Brett Murphy - Washington's Injury Lawyers

Your entire life experience goes into giving you the perspective to understand how people think and feel. Mine is especially broad and diverse. I grew up poor so I know what it means to work for a living. I did well in school so I got to go to some of the finest educational institutions in the country (Whitman College and Stanford Law School) where I met and mingled with the prosperous and powerful. I've now spent 39 years meeting and representing people from all walks of life. I have served on the other side of the bench, both as a Whatcom County District Court Judge and as a Part Time Federal Magistrate Judge, so I have seen the justice system from the perspective of the person who has to make the hard decisions. I believe these varied perspectives help me understand and empathize with the problems of people who come to me for help.

I enjoy helping people, rather than large institutions like corporations, governments or insurance companies. We limit our practice to major personal injury and wrongful death claims, so we are always on the side of people who have been hurt through no fault of their own against insurance companies which want to maximize their profits rather than pay legitimate claims. I like the feeling of championing justice by working on behalf of the relatively powerless against the relatively powerful.

My career allows me to accomplish three goals: to do good, to do well, and to have fun.

I do good by helping people who have been injured through no fault of their own. My clients are rich or poor, young or old, middle class or disadvantaged. The only things they have in common are that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were injured by someone else's carelessness, that they are now stuck dealing with an insurance company to recover their losses, and that they need my help in putting their financial lives back together. I feel good when I can help people rebuild their lives after an injury.

I do well because as I help clients, I earn a good living. I generally work on a contingent fee so the better I do for my clients, the better I do at earning a living myself. Since I am very good at what I do, I earn a very good living.

Finally, I have fun because I enjoy the challenge of taking on insurance companies and forcing them to live up to the promises they make when they sell a liability insurance policy. They have promised to pay for the damages inflicted by their insureds' negligence. I enjoy meeting and working with new people, both the clients I represent and the adversaries I meet in the legal system. I enjoy building a case, negotiating a settlement, and when the settlement offer is inadequate, I love to try cases before a jury. I believe it is possible, even in tragic situations, to enjoy the struggle for justice.

We employ 7 attorneys, 5 paralegals, 2 paralegal assistants, one office manager, and one receptionist. We are paperless, wireless, and completely mobile, so we can serve clients throughout Washington State from our six offices in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Bellingham, Mount Vernon, and Vancouver.

A big part of our job is to educate our clients on the legal issues they face. We never forget that it is the client's case, so the client must make the ultimate decisions. (For example, whether to settle out of court, and for how much.) It is our job to help educate each of our clients so that they can make fully informed choices.

We are always willing to review documents prepared by clients. However, it is often less expensive for us to draft documents ourselves based on our many years of experience, than to correct mistakes in documents drafted by clients who are not well trained in the law.