Righteous, Important Work

In a gray, three-story building kitty-corner from the Kitsap County Courthouse, boasting neither fancy lobby nor receptionist, a sign on the cherry-red door is simple. It reads: “Fong Law.”

Eric Fong, one of the more sought-after plaintiff’s attorneys in the state, is seated in a sparsely decorated office. His manner is as casual as his office décor. Sheets of poster paper, covered with case notes in nearly illegible scrawl, hang on the walls, along with some Huiochl yarn art. Otherwise, the walls are bare. 

His accomplishments are anything but. They include two of the largest compensatory verdicts for an individual in state history: a $91 million verdict, with co-counsel Ken McEwan, against APRO LLC, owner of numerous 76 gas stations and convenience stores; and with Talis Abolins of mctlaw, a $42 million verdict against the state of Washington in a sexual abuse trial. 

Fong was instrumental in getting state courts to limit oppressive crime-control measures in low-income housing that restricted who could visit residents. He represented musician George Clinton in a copyright case allowing Clinton to retain ownership of his music. He was named Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2022 by the Washington State Association for Justice and has been in The National Trial Lawyers Top 100 since 2009. 

All this from a guy who says he was a lousy student in law school. “I studied my rear end off and got a D in torts,” Fong says. 

But he did learn to march to the beat of his own drum. He describes a jury trial as a puzzle. “It’s expression,” he says. “It’s like music—it’s an art, self-expression where I can get up and be the voice of my client, connect with a group of people, and do what I consider righteous and powerful, important work.”

Many of Fong’s clients are people he feels are invisible in the justice system. “I don’t represent corporations, I don’t represent government,” he says. “I represent people.” 

“He does things the way he wants,” says litigator Jason Hatch with Jason Hatch Lawyer in Kent, a friend since law school. “Eric is just really creative and sometimes unorthodox and comes up with things that other people won’t necessarily see. … I’ve heard people from school say, ‘How does it work?’ It works because he knows what he’s doing. He’s figured out the law and he knows that he’s got it on his side.”

Born in 1971, Fong grew up in the farm country outside West Lafayette, Indiana. His father, Frank, came to the U.S. as a child from Shanghai when his family fled the communist takeover. Fong’s Swedish mother, Margareta, was studying to be a nurse and working as an au pair when his parents met in Princeton, New Jersey. “When I was a kid, we’d go to Sweden most summers, so I can speak Swedish,” Fong says. “But we never went to Shanghai—my dad wouldn’t talk about his life in China.”

In Fong’s family, achievement was emphasized. His father was a chemistry professor at Purdue University. Younger brother Peter is president of RTW, a life sciences investment and innovation firm, and sister Christina is a professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Academic success was expected, Fong says, but unlike his siblings he was an indifferent student at Indiana University. 

He liked sociology, took a criminology course, but it wasn’t the motivator to go to law school. What was? “I had to get a postgraduate degree in my family,” he says. “So it was either law school or business school.”

It was 1993, and Fong, lured by the siren calls of big mountains and grunge music, turned westward and applied to the University of Puget Sound. Today, sitting in his office in clothes echoing that period—blue jeans, gray flannel shirt, black Adidas cross-trainers—he says, “Seattle was the epicenter of the cultural universe, the coolest place in the country. UPS was by far the best school I got into. I remember driving to the law school for the first time and seeing Mount Rainier in my rearview mirror, and I’m like, ‘Wow!’”

Fong wasn’t especially enthralled by law school, either—until his third year. “I took a trial clinic class and did my first jury trial,” he recalls. “It was a misdemeanor case, and we won—we got a not-guilty verdict. The jury trial was exhilarating.”

After graduation, Fong found work in Port Orchard, handling mostly criminal defense under David Rovang, now retired from Becker Franklin Rovang. 

“It was a different day and age where private firms contracted to do public defense,” he says. Rovang, he adds, “was a great trial lawyer and he encouraged me to try cases. It paid nothing, but I just fell in love with the courtroom—caring for these people who just never had a chance. I was always in court, learning how to cross-examine, talking to judges, talking to witnesses, learning how to negotiate with a prosecutor. I am forever indebted to David. He mentored me.” 

In 1999, Fong became a partner and stayed with Rovang for over a decade. Burned out on public defender work, he gradually transformed his practice toward the civil side. In 2011 he decided to go it alone, but it wasn’t easy. “How do you balance your life when you take on all these responsibilities?” he says. “I was deeply lonely.”

Fong’s marriage was ending, and his practice fell apart as he found himself struggling with substance abuse. In 2015, after falling asleep while driving and nearly causing an accident, he went to an AA meeting and began to pick up the pieces. “It truly was a second lease on life,” Fong reflects. “My ability to connect with other people’s suffering is unquestionably connected to the understanding of my own, and the hurdles that I’ve overcome in life.”

First photo above: Fong has been a teacher of the Gerry Spence Method for 20 years, and is seen here with Spence and fellow attorneys. Second photo above: Fong with his parents at his law school graduation.

When Fong takes on a case, he assumes it’s going to trial. 

“I have to work it up that way,” he says. “I’ve never been afraid of it; I’ve always loved it. Some people would say that what I do is not good practice: ‘How can you encourage people not to take X amount of money? It’s their choice.’ But I think most lawyers err on the side of being conservative and not going to trial when it’s the constitutional right of our client. It’s the ultimate form of local government: the public coming in and making a statement.”

The $91 million verdict against APRO is a case in point, Fong says. It came as a result of a beating outside a Parkland gas station convenience store in 2015 following a robbery. Will Tisdale, who was outside the store, suffered severe brain injuries and needs lifelong care. APRO had originally offered $25,000 to settle the case. Tisdale’s sister-in-law happened to be a legal intern at Fong’s office, and she asked him to visit Tisdale. 

“I’ve seen it all,” Fong says. “But some people, you meet them and it takes your breath away because of the profound loss. It was a vicious, brutal attack with an aluminum baseball bat to the head,” Fong continues. “Tisdale’s Black, he’s gay, he was unemployed, had substance issues—he was not the kind of person that APRO respected. They thought they would get a free pass.” 

Fong says the convenience store industry’s switch to 24-hour days in the 1970s led to problems. “There was a crime wave around the country,” he says. “Stores were getting robbed, people were getting hurt and killed.” Fong says all sorts of issues were identified, from visibility and lighting to training employees in handling robbery attempts. He argued in court that, though the area had a high crime rate, the employee working at the Parkland store that night had not been properly trained in how to react to such a situation. The jury agreed.

To what does Fong attribute his success with juries? Part of it, he says, is due to his approach to jury selection. “Most lawyers are going to go with an agenda: ‘Who’s going to screw me, who am I afraid of, what do I need to do to advance my case?’ That’s not the way to pick a jury. If you’re putting that vibe out there—you’re rejecting people, you’re afraid of people—they can smell it.

“What I’m looking for is a feeling of respect for each other,” he says. “If, at the end of jury selection, the jury is open to trusting you and they’re open to the possibility that your case is OK, you’ve picked a hell of a jury.”

Dan Johnson, formerly a prosecuting attorney for Kitsap County and now in-house counsel for USAA insurance, has faced Fong in both criminal and civil court. “In criminal cases, you are in court against the same people day in and day out, and you have to develop a good, trusting relationship,” Johnson says. “If you burn your bridges with someone, you know you’re going to see them the next day and the next day, so you learn to trust people, even if they’re on the opposite side. Eric was never anything but upstanding. If he told me my witness was lying about something, I would tend to believe him above the witness.”

Johnson once nominated Fong for the honor of best plaintiff’s counsel awarded annually by the Washington Defense Trial Lawyers. “There were over 16 other nominations,” recalls Johnson of the 2013 competition, “and he won it hands-down. I think that’s the best thing you can say about someone—that as a plaintiff’s attorney you win an award from the defense bar for being respected and doing a good job.”

Along with co-counsel Talis Abolins of mctlaw, Fong obtained a $42 million verdict involving the failure of the Washington State Department of Corrections and the Department of Children, Youth & Families to protect a child from sexual abuse from her stepfather. “It was an example of government failure and ineptitude,” Fong says. “They knew a child was being abused and they let it happen.” 

Seeing the reforms that can follow a large verdict is one of the best parts of the job, he adds. “The insurance industry tightened the reins on convenience stores after the Tisdale verdict,” he says. “And I think that these two verdicts sort of redefined the value of a human life and have helped plaintiff’s lawyers get justice for their clients.”

It doesn’t always work out, of course. Fong refers to a recent case he tried in Anchorage: Chipps et al v. State of Alaska, Department of Corrections et al. Gabriella Chipps was left severely brain-damaged after a suicide attempt in an Anchorage jail. “The jury found the state negligent and responsible for the death, but the verdict was zero dollars.” Fong takes a breath. “This was a case about the system and its treatment of human beings, and they found that the system let a human being down … and gave her nothing.”      

That deep emotional investment makes his work high-risk, but also high-reward. “When you make a full commitment to yourself and you succeed, and the stakes are so high,” he says, “it’s nothing short of saving a life, even if it’s not a life-in-prison case or a catastrophic injury case. To help a soul and let them move on from something, it’s exhilarating.”

Fish Story

Fong’s office building may be ordinary, but not so his view across Sinclair Inlet to the southern peaks of the Olympics: Mount Lena, Mount Ellinor, The Brothers. “And the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard,” he adds. “It’s an extraordinary view.”

Fong loves the outdoors. He and his wife, Courtney, own property in Forks, and he often picks his way along the banks of the Bogachiel River for good steelhead fishing spots. “If I weren’t a lawyer, I’d be a fishing guide, making people happy by teaching them to fish,” he says.

As a child, Fong lived with his family in a lake house in Indiana. “I was maybe 6 when this old man down the road told me he would take me fishing in the morning. I was so excited, I put the worm on the hook the night before,” he laughs. “When I woke up, it was all dried and shriveled. And I had overslept! So I decided to teach myself.”