Best Lawyers in the Business

The leading lawyers in the Puget Sound region for 2013, as determined by their peers.

| January 2013 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Download the complete list in pdf format here.

This list is excerpted from the 2013 edition of The Best Lawyers in America, the preeminent referral guide to the legal profession in the United States. Published since 1983, Best Lawyers lists attorneys in 124 specialties, representing all 50 states, who have been chosen through an exhaustive survey in which thousands of the nation’s top lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. The 2013 edition of Best Lawyers is based on more than 3.9 million evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.

The method used to compile Best Lawyers remains unchanged since the first edition was compiled more than 25 years ago. Lawyers are chosen for inclusion based solely on the votes of their peers. Listings cannot be bought, and no purchase is required to be included. In this regard, Best Lawyers remains the gold standard of reliability and integrity in lawyer ratings.

The nomination pool for the 2013 edition consisted of all lawyers whose names appeared in the previous edition of Best Lawyers, lawyers who were nominated since the previous survey, and new nominees solicited from listed attorneys. In general, lawyers were asked to vote only on nominees in their own specialty in their own jurisdiction. Lawyers in closely related specialties were asked to vote across specialties, as were lawyers in smaller jurisdictions. Where specialties are national or international in nature, lawyers were asked to vote nationally as well as locally.Voting lawyers were also given an opportunity to offer more detailed comments on nominees. Each year, half of the voting pool receives fax or email ballots; the other half is polled by phone.

Voting lawyers were provided this general guideline for determining if a nominee should be listed among “the best”: “If you had a close friend or relative who needed a real estate lawyer (for example), and you could not handle the case yourself, to whom would you refer them?” All votes and comments were solicited with a guarantee of confidentiality – a critical factor in the viability and validity of Best Lawyers surveys. To ensure the rigor of the selection process, lawyers were urged to use only their highest standards when voting, and to evaluate each nominee based only on his or her individual merits. The additional comments were used to make more accurate comparisons between voting patterns and weight votes accordingly. Best Lawyers uses various methodological tools to identify and