The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday.

Each year the King County Bar Foundation hosts an annual event, the Breakfast with Champions. The Breakfast is our chance to honor the hard work of Bar Association staff and volunteers, highlight the Bar Association’s services, and build community with you, our champions of the law. I hope to see you there to say thank you in person!

For the April issue of the Bar Bulletin, I am pleased to share space with Carrie Griffen Basas, JD, Med. Carrie is the Executive Director of Disability Rights Washington. Prior to joining Disability Rights Washington, Carrie led Disability Law Colorado and the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds. Carrie has long worked to create strategies for equity, accessibility, and social impact and I am appreciative of her taking the time to share the following with the KCBA and our Bar Bulletin readers.

Michele Storms did not set out to become a lawyer.

Then she spent a summer during college volunteering at a shelter for unhoused women and children in Washington, D.C. The shelter’s ethos revolved around community. Everyone lived together — the people seeking housing and services and those providing them. They played with the children together. They shopped for food together. They cooked together. And they listened to each other’s stories.

In the latest installment of our series Tales from the Receivership Trail, I wanted to share a case study which confirms that crime, especially when a court-appointed receiver gets involved, does not pay. Here’s how it all went down — literally and figuratively.

A fruit fly passes through an open window into your kitchen and immediately swerves up, left, down, back up again, then veers toward another open window, disappearing into the Washington air. Another drunken fly with no depth perception and poor navigation, right? You see the seemingly aimless behavior and assume, based on the rules for how we judge our own human behavior, the fly must be rudderless, lost, sick, dying. Why else would anyone make such a maze of ups and downs, left turns and rights, just to fly in one window and out another? It could have flown a straight line. When we evaluate the behavior of the fruit fly with our own behavior as the measuring stick, could we be missing the real, predictable understanding for the fly’s behavior?

“Always Appealing” is a column addressing current issues in appellate practice and recent appellate cases written by the lawyers of Smith Goodfriend, P.S., a Seattle law firm that limits its practice to civil appeals and related trial court motions practice.

For the past 25 years, superior courts have had the authority to certify an issue for interlocutory appellate review. Historically, a party could obtain review by convincing the appellate court (usually, its commissioner acting as gatekeeper) in a motion for discretionary review that the superior court’s decision meets one of three established criteria — (1) obvious error rendering further proceedings useless,1 (2) probable error that substantially limits the freedom of a party to act,2 or (3) that “the superior court has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings . . . as to call for review by the appellate court.”3

Last month, I had the pleasure of presenting at the 26th Annual Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference, held at the University of Washington School of Law. I spoke on a subject that has become near and dear to me over the years, honesty. The following is an excerpt from my written materials.

When I began my litigation practice more than 38 years ago, mediation of tort claims was in its infancy. We brought our disputes before the judge who was assigned to try the case. I recall more than a few instances where the judge advised one party or the other that if they did not get “on board” with settlement, they should remember that the same judge would be ruling on their pre-trial motions and the evidence during trial. That felt like a threat, probably was, and sometimes it worked. We have come a long way in the past 35 years. And mediation has become a profession unto itself.

Reading Mary Jo Newhouse’s memorial to Steve Ellis in last month’s Bar Bulletin brought back so many fond memories of Steve’s time as a trustee of the King County Law Library. I was hired as Executive Director of KCLL during Steve’s tenure on the board. Transitioning from the relative quiet and stability of academia to the chaotic, funding challenged world of a public law library was a steep learning curve in more ways than one can count.

One thing I didn’t know coming into the role was that I had a library super-fan in my midst. Steve just loved everything about books and libraries — he would often fondly recall the many hours he spent at KCLL back in the old days and remark on how different things were back then when attorneys would be shoulder to shoulder at the tables and carrels with their piles of books. Even after Steve stepped off the KCLL law library board, I knew that when I saw his name in my email inbox it would inevitably be an inspiring article about the value of libraries and the continuing relevance of the work of librarians.

Did you know that, as well as the Bar Bulletin, King County Bar also publishes the Washington Lawyers Practice Manual (WLPM)? Not only is it Washington State’s most comprehensive legal reference set, it is also designed for all practitioners in Washington State and provides instant access to 26 of the most frequently used areas of law. Updated annually, this expansive resource is available as a whole or by the practice area.