Food safety advocate joins listeria fights

SEATTLE – Bill Marler updates his many blogs each day about the latest foodborne illness outbreak and travels the world delivering speeches, imploring the food industry to improve its safety measures. All this while working the phones to get money for the victims.

Like it or not, the personal injury attorney behind most every lawsuit associated with foodborne outbreaks is also known away from the courtroom as one of the nation’s leading food safety advocates. He’s always raising red flags about what he considers lax industry testing or inadequate government oversight.

Marler created a niche for himself since winning his first settlement in 1993 – $15.6 million for a girl sickened by E. coli from a Jack in the Box hamburger. He’s in the forefront again thanks to a listeria outbreak in cantaloupe that has sickened more than 100 people and killed at least 21.

His firm already has filed six lawsuits against Colorado grower Jensen Farms, where federal health authorities say the listeria outbreak originated, and a distributor. While Jensen recalled more than 300,000 cases of cantaloupe, neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the Food and Drug Administration has determined the source of the outbreak.

Critics contend his advocacy work isn’t based on the best available science and mainly serves to benefit his law firm. Colleagues call him a dedicated attorney who advocates for his clients and knows the subject matter as well as or better than anyone else.

“A lot of people who don’t know me very well see the workaholic, always traveling, the persona, but what I’ve tried to do with my job is to make it more of a vocation,” he said. “I love what I do, and I believe in what I do.”

In his downtown Seattle offices overlooking Puget Sound, employees wear jeans to work, and on this day Marler is casual in khakis and tennis shoes. The walls are lined with framed newspaper clippings and magazine articles depicting his victories, along with framed copies of checks from those cases.

Marler said his firm has won settlements totaling more than $600 million from some of the food industry’s biggest players: Cargill, Wal-Mart, Dole.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Miffed about being denied a partnership just short of four years into his tenure at a Seattle firm and feeling unappreciated in the midst of the Jack in the Box case, Marler packed up his office on a Sunday evening and left a resignation letter on the founding partner’s chair. His co-workers were stunned on Monday to find his office empty.

Now 54, he says he’s gotten smarter, though no less preoccupied with work.

Two years ago, Marler petitioned the federal government to ban strains of E. coli that can cause illnesses as serious as the most virulent strain, O157:H7. As a result of those efforts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced plans to begin testing for the strains in beef trimmings, beginning next year, despite industry opposition.

But regulators shouldn’t be applying a blanket ban to E. coli strains, argues Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. Rather, they should be focusing on strains that produce toxin resulting in severe illness.

“As a scientist, I would hope that his approach would be science-based, because science is a critical part of public health,” he said. “I think there could have been better science used in developing the new rule.”

Marler’s positions might not always be scientifically supported, said Dave Theno of Gray Dog Partners Inc., a consulting firm to the food industry, but because he’s representing the consumers’ best interests, it’s up to industry to find a way to improve things.

Theno was the chief food safety officer for Jack in the Box Inc. and sat across the table from Marler in the 1990s E. coli cases. Today, Theno considers Marler a friend, colleague and co-advocate for food safety.