Lawyer takes up safe-food fight

SEATTLE – You might say that E. coli has been very, very good to William Marler.

Ditto for salmonella, listeria, hepatitis and the like. If there’s an outbreak of food-borne illness anywhere in the country – spinach, cookie dough, hamburgers, you name it – chances are Marler will be filing lawsuits.

“I love my job,” he said from his Seattle law office. “I represent poisoned little children against giant corporations.”

Talk about a winning formula. Marler, 52, says he and his firm, Marler Clark, have pried $500 million in settlements out of companies that have sickened customers. Depending on your point of view, making millions off sick people may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing. But right now, food safety is unequivocally a big thing.

In March, President Barack Obama said the nation’s lax food-safety policies have created a “hazard to public health.” He appointed a high-level policy group to “upgrade our food-safety laws for the 21st century.” Then a major report warned it would be way too easy for terrorists to poison the food supply.

In the midst of all of this, 80 people were infected with the bacteria E. coli after eating Nestle cookie dough.

This year, food-safety legislation was introduced in Congress – legislation that, for the first time in years, seems to have a chance of passing.

Now, Marler’s not only trying to wring money out of food companies, he’s trying to change the way our food is safeguarded in the first place. He’s been lobbying his political buddies, arranging for clients to testify in Congress and even sending them to reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of which put his clients’ E. coli ordeals on the front pages.

“I’m impatient,” he said. “For God sakes, get the bill out of the Senate.”

And then, in early fall, he hit upon an idea: T-shirts.

“Pass meaningful food safety legislation before Thanksgiving,” the drab gray shirts, sent to every U.S. senator, say.

“Put a trial lawyer out of business.”

His smiling face, with a line through it, is emblazoned on the front.

It’s funny. And it’s serious.

Brianne Kiner was Marler’s introduction. In 1993, when the 9-year-old Redmond girl was hospitalized with E. coli infection, her kidneys failed. Her pancreas crashed. Her liver stopped working. She suffered seizures and was in a coma for 40 days.

When she came to, she had to relearn to walk. To chew. To use the bathroom. Her health problems – and expenses – are lifelong.

All this from eating an undercooked hamburger from Jack in the Box. Three kids died in that outbreak, and another 500 Washington residents were sickened.

Brianne’s family hired Marler, who then was with the Keller Rohrbak firm, to file suit. Marler got Brianne a $15.6 million settlement. Settlements for his other Jack clients ran into the millions. (Generally, clients get 65 percent to 75 percent after costs, and the firm gets the rest.)

After Jack in the Box, he went back to being a general-practice plaintiff’s lawyer. Then, in 1996, came Odwalla. The all-natural juice company sickened 66 people with its unpasteurized juice. Considering the hubbub around Jack in the Box, victims knew where to turn.

By this point, Marler knew the system to protect us from food-borne illness is full of holes. Regulations are a hodgepodge; oversight authority is scattered between the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which covers meat and poultry, and the Food and Drug Administration, which covers everything else.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 300,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die from food-borne illnesses each year. Some 76 million are sickened.

Back during the Odwalla outbreak, however, there wasn’t as much awareness of the issue. But after that, Marler had a hunch. In 1998, he recruited his former Jack in the Box legal adversaries, Denis Stearns and Bruce Clark, and started a law firm that specialized in food-borne illnesses – a radical idea at the time.

Today, they have clients all over the country. They not only set up a Web site for the firm, they also created sites with comprehensive medical information on every conceivable food-borne illness – and included links back to Marler Clark.

Which brings us back to his oft-repeated plea: Put me out of business. What he really means is he’s tired of seeing so many people get horribly sick. He believes a lot of illness could be prevented with stricter food-safety laws, the sort Congress is considering.

Some time ago, he decided that just suing food companies wasn’t enough. He travels across the country, and even the world, to speak about food safety to those who are in a position to do something about it – the farmers, processors and officials in charge of it all.

He tells them about his clients: the children on ventilators; the once-vibrant men on dialysis; the moms who’ve lost their intestines to the ravages of food-borne pathogens. And he lets them know how a jury might view things.

Marler calls it the “You shouldn’t poison people” speech.

Periodically, in the wake of an outbreak, Congress considers food-safety legislation.

“In 2006, it was spinach. (Lawmakers) shook a bag of spinach, belittled the corporate leaders but nothing happened.”

Same thing with the peanut-butter outbreak in 2008.

But this year, things seem different. Obama is interested. And consumers are more aware of food- safety problems. The House passed one bill, and another bill was passed out of a Senate committee last week.