by Hannelore Sudermann
photography by Bruce Andre and Robert Hubner
The nation's leading food-borne illness attorney tells
all.
 Bruce Andre
On a fall day in 1984, a keen young
law clerk took off alone on an errand to collect evidence for a
case.
Since his destination, the Swedish Medical Complex, was perched
just up the hill from the Seattle firm where he worked, Bill Marler
decided to walk.
In his mid-20s, Marler wasn’t going to be a clerk for long. He
had plans to climb the ranks of the city’s litigators and,
eventually, run for public office. As the first Washington State
University student ever to sit on Pullman’s city council, he had
already developed a taste for politics.
On the day of his walk, Marler’s firm was defending a company
against charges of selling asbestos products in the 1950s, knowing
that they were hazardous. A man named William Kinsman had died of
pleural mesothelioma, an asbestos-triggered cancer of the thin
layer of tissue that lines the chest cavity and covers the lungs.
The disease can remain latent for decades and then spring into a
virulent form, bringing shortness of breath, pain under the rib
cage, a dry cough, and then blood, signs that the cancer is
spreading into the lungs. Kinsman had been exposed, according to
the suit, while working in the Bremerton shipyards. Marler knew the
site, since he grew up on a small farm just 10 miles away.
As he hiked up Madison Street, he felt pleased with his life. He
was sailing through law school and had plans to build a great
career. His breezed into Swedish and asked for the Kinsman
evidence.
To his bewilderment, he was handed a human lung—a pink and grey
organ clearly visible inside a thick plastic pouch. “No one told me
to bring something to carry it in,” he says.
As he walked back down the hill, gingerly carrying the lung that
for six decades had given life and breath to Mr. Kinsman, a single
thought buzzed through his head: “I don’t want to do this.” With
some relief, he delivered the specimen to the firm’s medical expert
and then tried to wipe the wonder from his mind. He knew that
companies like the one his firm was defending deserved competent
legal representation. And he knew that good lawyers, no matter
which side they were on, were what made the system work.
He watched the firm’s attorneys depose the victim’s widow later
that day, and heard her tearfully describe the agony of her
husband’s demise. “I’m sitting across the table from someone who
had been married to a guy for 40 years,” says Marler. “He retires,
and two years later he’s dead.”
Marler knew the answer to his quandary then: this was the wrong
side for him.
Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
Continued
|
