Fury Bailey - Personal Injury - Wrongful Death Attorneys

MY HARDEST BATTLE

by

William S. Bailey

Fury Bailey

710 – 10 th Avenue East

Seattle , WA 98102

There were no lawyers in my extended family, though my penchant for debating household rules sometimes led my exasperated father to exclaim, “You might as well be a lawyer and get paid for arguing, since you like to do it so much.” But my only contact with the profession itself was watching Perry Mason on TV every week, with his inevitable, heroically skilled extractions of “I did it” confessions at the very end of each episode, saving yet another innocent client from a murder rap.

College in the late 1960's was a great awakening for me. Up until then, I had viewed America and the world through the idealistic, somewhat naïve perspective of my parents. That all changed abruptly, with my growing awareness of inequality of opportunity, poverty and racism, as well as our crumbling inner cities, with their broken down justice systems. The slogan of the times, “If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem,” motivated me to be a progressive force in my adult life. But doing what? For a time, it seemed easier to discard career options than to find the right one.

Gradually the law emerged as the best way for me to focus on the social good, with the potential to constructively change American life. So I took the LSAT, filled out applications and ended up moving to Chicago to attend Northwestern University Law School . This transition initially was a gritty culture shock, coming from the mellow hippie ethos of Oregon . Chicago turned out to be a livable place, but did have number of urban problems, just waiting for activist lawyers to solve – police brutality, government corruption, wrongful deprivation of liberty and assembly line justice among them. Quickly moving away from the predictable boredom of law school, I got involved in the community, determined to make a difference. But it was clear that in real life, results wouldn't happen in a half-hour like on Perry Mason. Yet, this fight for justice was a means of fulfilling what Joseph Campbell said was the highest calling of a human being:

Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. . . . The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.

Ultimately, though Chicago did not lack for interesting and worthy legal causes, I missed the West Coast, moving to Seattle with my wife Sylvia in 1976. After two years as a VISTA volunteer there, working with abused and troubled children, and then two more as a public defender doing the same, I was approaching burnout. Seeing a never-ending chain of basically good-hearted kids who never had a chance in life was more than I could bear.

After two years of workers' compensation defense with the State Attorney General's Office, I ended up in private practice for the first time – representing injured plaintiffs in the then rapidly expanding field of asbestos product liability litigation. My sense of mission as a new plaintiffs' lawyer could not have been better defined, with many of my clients' either dead or dying of asbestos related disease. My public defender experience in the courtroom served me well for the multiple asbestos trials that followed, with several successful trips to our state supreme court as well, setting ground rules for this litigation that gave asbestos-injured workers and their families a fair chance.

Somehow, no matter what I accomplished, an inner voice kept driving me on to do more, to make justice more than a word chiseled in marble above the courthouse entrance. This gained greater urgency as I saw my two children, Rob and Mimy (joined much later by Lillian in 1991) come of age in a society where so many needed social objectives remained either unarticulated or stalled. In my view, adults, particularly parents, had a responsibility to do everything possible to make the world a fit place for all children to be happy, grow and learn. I gave our society low marks overall in this regard.

This abiding concern for my own children and everybody else's, led me to take on the toughest challenge of my life. In February of 1989, I was relaxing at a Sunday brunch in the home of longtime friends from Chicago days who also had migrated to Seattle . One of the people present, Peter Eglick, an environmental/land use lawyer with a long history of representing community action groups, came up to me and said, “Bill I just heard from the present City Attorney that he won't be running for re-election. I want you to think about making this race. You could change the philosophy of that office and make it into one that actually improves the quality of life in Seattle . It's an obscure and hard job, with no political future, but an important one.” I was flattered, but deferred, honestly never having thought of such a thing. I'd always been politically interested, but only as a background figure, such as co-counsel for the Washington State Democratic Party. As public-spirited as I was, being a candidate had always just seemed too much. There were a multitude of very good reasons not to run – among them, an eight-month campaign ordeal of nonstop effort, the dreaded asking people for money (I had hated to even sell little league raffle tickets as a kid) and reporters trying to take negative swipes at me. And, as the sole source of support of a family of four, I would need to keep my law practice going. Sylvia was not pleased by the prospect of me as a candidate when I told her later: “You work too hard as it is. This is one more thing to drive you crazy. Don't do it!”

A ritual I'd had ever since my kids were little was to go into their rooms at night, to check on them, the last thing before I went to bed. No matter what stresses of my day had been, the peace and serenity of seeing them asleep in their beds always gave me an abiding sense of well-being, as well as a renewed sense of purpose for what my life was all about.

The question that now kept coming back to me, after Peter's recent inquiry about the City Attorney election, was – “If you care about your kids as much as you say, why wouldn't you make this sacrifice to help improve the city in which they are growing up? Surely this is not too much to ask.” After struggling for a week with this, I realized that I couldn't say no. While Sylvia had given me sensible advice, I couldn't follow it.

The next eight months were every bit as grueling, even worse, than I had imagined. It was the greatest, most consuming effort of my life – an endless succession of meetings, telephone calls, interviews, speeches, appearances, fundraisers, position papers and strategy sessions. And all for a citywide race. I could not remotely conceive of how anyone could stretch this to statewide or national boundaries and stay sane.

My campaign theme was to turn the sleeping giant of the city's largely indifferent legal bureaucracy into a vital public interest law firm that took up the rights of deserving constituents, such as battered women and neglected children, not just one that processed traffic tickets and regulated building permits. I studied local problems with great care, such as the broken down Seattle Municipal Court System, writing newspaper editorials on what could be done to improve things. These were taken seriously and helped to define the issues in this race.

I rarely saw my family. Campaign appearances kept me out late seven nights a week. I rarely returned home before 11:00 p.m., only to get up at 6:30 a.m. the next morning to start the cycle all over again. Always a restless sleeper, even under the best of circumstances, I was rarely able to get more than a few consecutive hours of sleep, given all the mounting stresses of the campaign. I was all revved up for the trial of my life – an election.

I was one of the two finalists to win in the September primary, with the general election two months away. The elation of a primary victory was short lived as it was back to more of the same campaign grind. But the thought that I could make a better future for my kids through the law kept me going.

In the end, I lost by a few thousand votes. My wife and I left town the week after the election, going to the big island of Hawaii for a much needed sanity break. This was the first quality time we'd spent together in eight months. She asked me at one point, “Do you think you will run for anything again? You did very well for a first time candidate.” “Probably not. Though the goal was worthwhile, I just wasn't cut out to be a politician. But I'll always be glad I made the effort. Now I won't ever wonder what it would be like to run for an office or feel that I somehow had failed to follow, in some way, the public service ideals that led me to law school in the first place.”

Though I hadn't planned on this, this failed attempt at public office had a silver lining – a heightened appreciation of the value of my life as a trial lawyer, helping individuals and families devastated by injuries caused through no fault of their own. The courthouse is the great leveler of the playing field in the intense competition of American life, the protector of the powerless, the friend of the friendless. While I remain saddened that some Americans don't realize this, I know in my own heart how vitally important our legal system is in preserving what we all value most. And I am as proud as can be that my now twenty-two year old daughter, Mimy, who was just eight at the time I ran for Seattle City Attorney, will be going to law school this fall, helping to carry the fight for justice on in the next generation. I can't think of a better or more honorable career for her.

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