Bill Marler got his first food poisoning case when he was less than four years out of law school. Against the odds, he almost single handedly changed the food industry in the United States. He has represented thousands affected by food poisoning and recovered hundreds of millions. Most importantly, he is a really humble and nice guy.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. Bill Marler just had to listen to my overly-dramatic intro music, but we're learning as we go. We were just talking. I said it's crazy. You don't have a podcast and you said you don't have time and COVID allowed me this free time to do something I'd been wanting to do for a while. Bill Marler is, I don't even think it's arguable, the foremost food injury lawyer in America which has created you to be one of the foremost food safety experts probably around the world.

What I want to talk to you about, food cases, how you got into it. You sent me a little bit of background information. I'm in San Antonio. Migrant farmworker is something that's in the past history of so many people in this city and lawyers I know and friends of mine. Talk to me about how you had some time working as a migrant farmworker.

Bill Marler: [laughs] Yes. When I was 16, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. My parents were both teachers, really good people. I had decided that I didn't want to hang around the house and hang around the little town I was living in for the summer. I wanted to go seek adventure. A friend of a friend of a friend said, "Oh, man, you could work in the apple orchards and pear orchards of Eastern Washington and make a fortune."

I was like, "Gosh, that sounds like a great idea." I told my mom and dad. I said, "I'm going to do this." They're like, "No, no, you're not. You're going to get a job here." I was like, "No, no, no, I think I'm going to do it." "No, no, no, you're not going to do it." One Saturday, when they're-- to the grocery store, I packed a duffel bag and hiked down to the road. You could hitchhike back then. By eight hours later, I wound up in a little town on the Columbia River that's known for raising cherries, apples.

I worked that whole summer from Eastern Washington to Eastern Oregon to the eastern side of British Columbia, which is called essentially the Okanagan Valley. It's where all Washington fruits and vegetables were raised. Now, with global warming, it's the hot spot for wine. Now, Oregon pinots and Washington cabs are right up there because we warmed up the planet enough that up here in the Pacific Northwest can grow good wine.

It was a really interesting experience. I think the thing that I took away from it was just how hard those people work. Back then, this is 1970s. Back then, it was White, Black, Hispanic, but a lot of poor Whites. It was a different demographic than really what you see now. Although in slaughter facilities across the Midwest, a lot of the people in the slaughter facilities are Eastern European. I learned a lot about immigrants.

Justin: When you were doing it, was that not the Hispanic migratory farmworkers? Would they not get up that high?

Bill: It was very few. There were a handful. Nowadays, that is what it is. Right now, Washington and the COVID thing, Washington as a state has done pretty well, considering we were the first state that blew up, but we're doing really well in Western Washington. In Eastern Washington where food production is, we're starting to see some of the small towns that have food production facilities blow up with COVID problems. Exactly the reasons for that is that people coming to Washington or is it just the working conditions, it's probably a combination of all those things.

Justin: Yes. Bill, a lot of people that listen to this podcast are lawyers, young lawyers, especially, I seem to hear a lot from. How did you get into the law? We're going to talk about food cases and spend that time. At some point, we all decide, I decided due to a family trauma that we had or a family tragedy, that I wanted to be a guy suing big corporations. That interested me in it. I felt passionate about it. How did you get into the law?

Bill: When I went to college, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. When I was at the end of my freshman year at Washington State University, the Cougars in Pullman, Washington, I stayed that summer to work on a farm primarily because I had an expertise in that now. I stayed that summer and got connected with some the guy that was the student body president. We've decided it would a fun thing to do to run some students for the Pullman City Council. This is at 1977, so I just turned 19 years old.

18-year-olds had just gotten the right to vote just a few years earlier. I got serious about it. I canvassed the entire town and I won by 51 votes. For a while, I was the youngest person elected in the United States to any kind of public office and was the first student ever elected to the Pullman City Council. It was a four-year term. I think that really started to gel my interest in becoming a lawyer. I had visions of being a lawyer and being the youngest president. That didn't quite turn out exactly the way I planned, but no harm, no foul, things turned out just fine.

Justin: Other than being elected to city council, kind of the normal path of college straight into law school?

Bill: Yes. Well, I spent a year after law school working as a paralegal, which I'm constantly glad I did that. I worked as a paralegal and then went to law school, worked actually while I was going to school. I was lucky I did not come out with a lot of debt. Went to work for the big law firm in Seattle at the time. It was called Bogle & Gates. It had 300 lawyers. I wound up doing asbestos defense cases right out of the box.

After about a year of doing depositions of mesothelioma victims and their spouses, I decided that I couldn't do that. I went to work for a small plaintiffs firm. I was there for about a year and then it was a husband-and-wife team. Really good cases and high-end PI cases. I learned a ton, but they got divorced and the firm blew up, so I was without a job. I wound up getting a job at a 50-lawyer insurance defense litigation firm. It was a solid job.

I was married. We just had a baby. I was wanting to make sure I had a stable situation. The thing I did there, and this is, I think, for your young warriors listening, is that I never just decided to just take the cases that I got. I tried to always think about doing my own thing, try to build my practice. The fact that I had plenty of experience, I went to some of the lawyers. If we didn't have a conflict, I said, "There's no reason why I can't take that car case."

One time, I've met a cabby. I was going somewhere. The cab guys were trying to create a different union. They asked me to come to their meeting and help them organize. I went to their meeting and help them organize. From that, one of the guy's sister's kid had been murdered by an escaped convict, a pedophile. I sued the state of Washington. That was my first big plaintiff's case. It caused a lot of grief in the law firm because it was very high profile.

Justin: How old were you then as a lawyer?

Bill: About three years out of law school.

Justin: Okay. Nice.

Bill: The great thing about being overconfident, sometimes you don't know how stupid you are. I think primarily from being on the city council, I felt like I was well-qualified when I'm probably not. As that case was perking, the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak hit the state of Washington and it was January 19th, 1993. I remember that day. I lived on an island. I still live on that same Island across from Seattle and I took the ferry every day. It was a rainy day.

I was reading the morning newspaper sitting on the ferry and it was like, "There's something going on at a Jack in the Box? E. coli? What the hell?" I got to the office that day and no lawsuits had been filed. I get a call from a former client of mine who I had helped in a workers' comp case. It had been a couple of years earlier. She called me and said, "I don't know if you'd be interested, but I have a friend whose kids are in the hospital with this E. coli thing." I hopped in a taxi of one of my buddies from the taxi service and drove down to Tacoma, which is about 30 miles away, and signed these people up.

Justin: Your snapshot at the time, you had done no products work?

Bill: Well, yes, not any product--

Justin: Asbestos defense, but you were their low man on the totem pole.

Bill: I knew about strict liability and I presumed that food was a product, so strict liability applied.

Justin: Had people done any food poisoning cases at that point?

Bill: At the time, we didn't really know how big this thing was. I came back and I drafted a complaint. I probably shouldn't tell you this story because if it comes back, my wife will get mad at me.

Justin: [chuckles] Go on.

Bill: Go on. Go on farther, you bastard.

Justin: [laughs]

Bill: When I was in Pullman, Washington, a woman I dated was-- They have the Edward R. Moreau communications program. It's a well-respected communication. You'll find a Washington State University grad in most newsrooms across America. That's a--

Justin: It's like Missouri?

Bill: Yes, exactly. Yes, for writing.

Justin: Journalism, yes.

Bill: Journalism. Anyway, at the time, I had this girlfriend, pretty serious. Anyway, she dumped me for the guy who wound up being the quarterback for the football team. Years later, here I am, a lawyer with this case and she is the anchor for the local TV station. I called her up and I said, "Hey, it's Bill." "Hi, Bill. How are you doing?" "Great," blah, blah, blah. I said, "I think you owe me one." Anyway, I wound up being on TV that night when I filed the lawsuit and became the face of Jack in the Box of trying to explain to the public what was going on.

Justin: You were a three-year lawyer?

Bill: Yes, three and a half years. October, yes, so three and a half years and--

Justin: Didn't know enough to know what you didn't know.

Bill: Exactly, but I knew more than anybody else.

Justin: You were playing the media. You took a case nobody had done before and "Hey, take a swing."

Bill: Yes. I also had gone to the University of Washington medical school library and walked in and said-- This is before computers. This is crazy. This is before the internet and we didn't have email. I walked in and it was like I don't even know where to look for anything about E. coli. I just walked up to the librarian and said, "Hey, do you guys have anything about E. coli?" I just read all I could. At least I knew how to say it and I knew what the problem was.

Justin: Was this before or after that weird time in the '90s when the book Outbreak or the movie Outbreakcame out and everybody was scared of getting Ebola? Was that before or after that time?

Bill: This was before.

Justin: Okay, because there was that weird time in the '90s when everybody was scared of a pandemic.

Bill: Ebola, yes. Of course, now, we watch those movies and they look very similar to what we're seeing now.

Justin: Yes, that's right.

Bill: I went from having one case to 10 cases to 30 cases.

Justin: All individually filed?

Bill: Yes, and then a really interesting thing happened. There were a lot of good plaintiffs' lawyers in the Northwest, people who are on National Trial College and all that kind of stuff. Here I am, a third-year lawyer from a mid-sized insurance defense firm primarily with all these cases. The plaintiffs' bar was pretty pissed.

Justin: Yes?

Bill: Yes. I went to a meeting with them and they were pretty unhappy. Essentially, I smoothed it over by essentially saying, "Hey, look, I will do all the work. I will prove to you that I know what I'm doing and I can help us all." Really, from that point on, I took control of the case. I offered to do everything.

Justin: Did the other plaintiffs' lawyers have cases? Is that why they were--

Bill: Yes, they all had cases. They had one here, one there. Pretty soon, people were like, "Well, you've got 30 cases here. You take this one."

Justin: Did people think they were viable or were they taking a swing because you were? You see that in towards. You see it where everybody's like, "That's crap, but that guy is going to swing. I might as well ride along."

Bill: Yes. I think at the time, nobody knew quite what was going on.

Justin: What was the theory?

Bill: The theory was at the time that Jack in the Box had not cooked the hamburgers to a sufficient temperature to kill E. coli.

Justin: It was almost a negligence case then at that point, right?

Bill: Yes. As we got to know more, it became essentially as we started-- I started thinking about it as the hamburger was the product and the defect was the E. coli and the defect was not cooking it properly like-

Justin: - a manufacturing defect.

Bill: - manufacturing defect. That became the overarching theory. It became really clear that there were some-- four kids died and there were 50 children who had developed acute kidney failure. There was one girl who I wound up being retained by their family probably six months into the outbreak. She was hospitalized for over six months and they had every day-- You're too young to remember this. Back during the Iran hostage crisis in the '70s, it was every night, there was like, "Day 52 of the hostage crisis." Every night on TV was "Day 52 of Brianne Kiner."

Justin: Is that right?

Bill: Oh yes. It was like just a drumbeat of that, but circling back to the relationships with lawyers is that like projects in college. If you offered to do stuff, then don't be like say, "Hey, I get your fee," or you're just doing it for the right reasons. If you offer to do stuff, it's amazing how many people will let you do it. The thing that came out of after two years of litigation and me transferring law firms in the middle of that, I decided that about a year into it, I went to the partners of the firm I was in.

By then, I had about 100 cases. It was pretty clear that by then, I was figuring out and I'd been hired by this family of this child and a couple of people who've lost children. It was pretty clear that this was going to be a big deal. I had to say, "Hey, look, make me the 23rd partner and I'll just get my 1/23rd share of whatever." They were like, "No, no."

Justin: They said no?

Bill: "You're not in law school." I'm like, "Okay." I actually went to the senior partner of the firm. Wonderful guy. About a year after I left, he passed away. The family asked me to speak at his funeral, which pissed everybody off for the firm. Nonetheless, I went to him and said, "Pinckney." His name was Pinckney Rohrback. "Pinckney, what should I do?" He goes, "Bill," he goes, "You gotta do the right thing for your client and everything else will be okay." That night, I wrote a note to the managing partner and said I'm leaving the firm. I joined another firm, wrote a letter to all my clients saying, "You have a choice. You can stay with the firm. You can come with me. Your complete choice." All but one client came with me.

Justin: Wow, today, that would lead to a ton of fee fight lawsuits where you all go--

Bill: No, no, no, it wasn't cool at all. They were mad. They threatened to sue me. I said, "Hey, let's do mediation," went to mediation. I agreed to give them half of my fee at the end of the case. Whatever the fee was, I gave them half. They were like, "Awesome." I tried to take a big deal. Through to my first mediation, we settled $25 million worth of cases. I walked a check over to them for $2.5 million.

Justin: Did you have any idea what the value was in these cases?

Bill: No, they didn't either.

Justin: I read the book Poisoned. That's the seminal book about--

Bill: That tells the story.

Justin: Yes, about that litigation and they didn't-- Jack in the Box didn't take you seriously at all at first, right?

Bill: The great thing about discovery is it's such a fun tool. I remember the breaking point. I don't know if it's in the book, but the breaking point of that litigation was I realized that there was shareholder litigation that was alongside of us. There's all the shareholders of Jack in the Box who sued Jack in the Box for essentially causing this outbreak and making their stock price go down.

I knew that the litigation was going on and they had a protective order, but I didn't. I called up the lawyer and I said, "Hey, could you come over and look at some of my documents?" He was looking at the documents that I'd called in and he goes, "Well, I can't tell you what other documents I have, but I have other documents that you probably-- they're copies of your documents but with handwriting." I moved to intervene in the shareholders' litigation.

Justin: That's great.

Bill: In fact, I argued that motion. The guy on the other side of it was Bruce Clark, who's now my partner. He represented Jack in the Box. The court ruled in my favor and I was able to get access to all those documents. Once I got that, yet everything became clear that Jack in the Box knew about the cooking temperatures, made a conscious decision to ignore it because it interfered with their two-minute turnaround cook time. That timing was more important than the temperature.

Justin: Wow. [chuckles]

Bill: After that, it was just like the cases just settled.

Justin: How many cases did you end up having in that?

Bill: Just a little over a hundred of mix and sizes. Unfortunately, some