Want to Put Us Out of Business? Come Help Us Try.
Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor paralyzed by a hamburger, whose case put the grinding of American beef on the front page of The New York Times and won Michael Moss a Pulitzer Prize. Thirty-plus years later we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered — and there is more work than there are lawyers to do it. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Nebraska Beef, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms, Taco Bell and Boar’s Head.
As I write this, on August 19, 2026: a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments now count at 31,521 people and rising. The federal government called it 1,947 in nine states until it changed what qualifies as a case in August; its own number is now 9,481 in seventeen states, 398 hospitalized, two dead. Michigan by itself reports 13,909 cases — more than the federal government counts for the entire seventeen-state outbreak. We have five cases filed against Taco Bell, four different franchise operators and Taylor Farms, and more than two hundred other people in twenty-six states have retained us to find out how they were poisoned. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa — 431 sick in 32 states, Chipotle and QDOBA — which Minnesota epidemiologists and a company traceback found before it ever reached FDA’s outbreak table; a month later the grower still has not been named and the recall of what it sold has spread to more than 160 grocery products. Infant botulism litigation against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria out of Boar’s Head. E. coli O157:H7 from beef kofta and from romaine. Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs and from a Lexington pie shop. E. coli O145 in frozen blueberries. Vibrio from raw seafood in Queens. Read a month of marlerblog.com. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.
Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. You will read FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, USDA establishment records, whole genome sequencing and PulseNet clusters, epidemic curves built by state health departments, and — this summer — the sanitation and rainfall records of a Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown and the traceback on a lot of peppers out of Sinaloa. That work gets done before the complaint is filed, not in discovery. You will also have the Outbreak Database, which this office built and still maintains — decades of outbreaks, searchable, and no other firm in the country has it. Spanish is a real plus.
And half of this job is not litigation at all. E. coli O157:H7 became an adulterant in American beef in 1994; six more strains followed because we petitioned USDA to make them so. We helped pass FSMA in 2011, petitioned — so far without success — to have outbreak strains of Salmonella declared adulterants in 2019, and pushed hepatitis A vaccination for food workers in 2020. This year alone: an infant formula bill in the House, a food safety bill in the Senate, the Stop Foodborne Illness petition pending at FDA asking it to tell the public where recalled food went, comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028, and a standing demand that CDC count Cyclospora again. I publish Food Safety News, I have written over 6,000 posts on Marler Blog since 2004, I speak all over the world, and I teach food safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. You will do this too — including writing here under your own name, where reporters will read it. Within a few years it will be you the conference invites, the health department calls and the reporter quotes; our lawyers speak to industry groups, public health audiences and university classes, and that platform is handed over, not loaned. Work out of this office has been cited in more than a thousand media reports. We also correct in public: when a poultry veterinarian wrote in last month to tell me a post of mine was wrong, we ran the correction louder than the original. Being right matters less here than getting it right. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.
If you want to know what that adds up to, read the testimonials page on billmarler.com and pay attention to who is on it: a former FDA food safety czar, a former USDA food safety official, the retired head of the Produce Marketing Association. Michael Pollan wrote that the federal watchdog on food safety is asleep at the switch and we are what is left. One of the lawyers who defended the other side in the Jack in the Box cases became my law partner. You will spend your career arguing with the food industry, and some of the people you argue with will end up thanking you for it.
We are looking for an associate with at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal, or complex tort — who is ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them: you will carry your own docket from the start.
Here is what you will not do here. There is no billable hour requirement and no origination credit to chase — the clients find us, and the firm carries the cost of every case out of its own pocket until it resolves. There is no committee, no partner standing between you and the person who decides, and no waiting your turn: when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And there is no volume. We turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.
Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and the honest truth is that we want you here — living on the island, not commuting to it. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from downtown Seattle, in a town where you can walk to work, walk to lunch, and walk home. Most people who make the move do not move back. But the right lawyer matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound, or willing to relocate, and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help the right person get here.
What you’ll actually do: file in federal and state courts across the country, write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases before anyone sees a courtroom — the medical chronology, the liability analysis, the damages model, all of it yours — take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists, work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis cases with the best experts in the field, sit with families in hospital rooms, and try cases. The docket is national; you will be on airplanes. It has been international as well — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa. You will be trusted early and often.
Many of our clients are children, and on those cases the last thing you do is the hardest. A settlement for a child has to be approved by a judge, cleared of Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA and sometimes federal military liens, and structured — now and then into a special needs trust — so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak took finally has to be replaced. If you have never done a minor’s compromise, you will.
What you need: licensed and in good standing somewhere, admissible pro hac vice everywhere else — Washington admission is not required; real deposition experience; the writing chops to draft a complaint that reporters quote; and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus, not a requirement — we’ll teach you the microbiology.
What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; bar dues and CLE; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, the Netflix documentary about this work — watch it before you apply. Also: a commute that involves a ferry or no ferry at all, and a firm that goes home for a safer dinner because of you.
One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area. Everyone here can name the child whose case they will never forget. That is why they stay. A client wrote to us that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after; that somebody is going to be you as often as it is me. I am not looking for a lawyer who wants a job. I am looking for one who cannot look away from it and wants to spend the next thirty years making a difference.
The job is open now. Resume, writing sample and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. The rest of it is public too: marlerclark.com and billmarler.com. No recruiters. Equal
Equal opportunity employer.