The Many Hats of Stephen Willey

Not many law firm bios contain earworms but Stephen Willey has the exception. Below a serious photo of him, arms crossed, and several paragraphs on his business litigation bona fides, the bio finishes by quoting the Rupert Holmes’ song “Escape.” Willey, it says, likes “piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, the feel of the ocean and, of course, the taste of champagne.”

“I was just having fun,” Willey says. “Law firm bios are often pretty stodgy, and I wanted something that wasn’t. It’s sort of a ridiculous song, but I get a lot of appreciative comments from clients of a certain age.”

Willey also knows a thing or two about escape. His father was a lawyer—a commercial litigator like he is—but the son’s path to the law wasn’t exactly a straight line. “I spent a lot of time resisting it,” says the California native. “It was wanting to do something different than my father had done.”

Almost every step he took away from the law wound up making him a better lawyer. 

At Williams College, he majored in English with an eye toward becoming a writer. He moved to New York City, where he taught English at a private high school on the Upper West Side. “Teaching is about figuring out how to approach people,” he says. “If you can’t figure out how to reach people, you’re not going to make any progress. The same is true when you’re speaking to a judge or jury.”

A few years later he left to seek a job in publishing. While he searched, the school gave him his first freelance gig: ghostwriting recommendation letters from the school for seniors heading to college.

“That’s come full circle in the sense that, when I write a brief or I put together an argument, I’m doing the same thing. I’m assembling the folder. I’m trying to figure out what the facts are. I’m trying to get the presentation,” Willey says. But there is one difference: “I’m not sitting in my shorts in my un-air-conditioned apartment in New York doing it.”

As summer wound down, so did the work. So Willey got a job tending bar at a new nightclub in the Meatpacking District. And when the cook got busted? “They came to me and said, ‘Can you cook?’” They put him in charge of the kitchen: planning the menu, buying the right amount of food, and mustering up a variety of meals—done right and on time—for 70 to 100 tables a night. 

“It was terrifying,” he says. 

Again, perfect training for the law. “You walk into a courtroom and things are going sideways and there’s too much happening and you’ve got to figure out how to parse the chaos.”

Willey finally did land that job in publishing—as a freelance fact-checker for GQ magazine. That attention to detail also stuck with him. “I say to people who work with me, ‘You don’t have to be as OCD as me, but you have to try,’” he says. “Which really is just a way of saying, ‘Hey, be careful and make sure we know what’s there. Making sure your facts are right, your citations are right.’”

In 1991, Willey decided to finally go down the path he’d long been avoiding. After graduating from University of Wisconsin Law School, he spent five years as an associate with Perkins Coie in Seattle, where he learned he loved litigation, then left  to serve as corporate counsel for a Silicon Valley startup. In 2003, he moved back to Seattle to join a boutique firm, where he would remain for the next two decades. 

“He takes a very pragmatic approach to problem-solving,” says commercial litigator Jonah Harrison of Arete Law Group, who has faced Willey as opposing counsel. “He takes it from a regular human perspective. He’s not overly formalistic, and he figures out a way to approach problems and get them done.”

Willey’s cases have included battles between corporate giants such as Amazon and Expedia (his client); a trade-secret dispute between his client InfoFlows and Bill Gates’ Corbis, in which he won a $36 million jury award; and a successful defense against claims of ADA violations over seating at the Seattle Mariners’ stadium. 

In 2024, Savitt Bruce & Willey merged with Fennemore, becoming its Seattle office. “It’s a good place to be,” he says. “The most important thing is we actually like the people we work with.”