Forty years ago, on May 18, 1980, Washington’s once-conical Mount St. Helens erupted, killing approximately 57 people, and causing millions, if not billions, in damages.  Writers in both the Seattle Times[1] and the New York Times[2] recently have argued that tensions between science, politics, and economics that came to the fore with the Mount St. Helens eruption teach something pertinent to the policy-making challenges presented by a pandemic. That may be true, but it is above our ...

Part Two (read Part One here) (This is the second of two articles based on David Bruce’s presentation to the 2018 Annual Meeting of the League of California Cities.  Mr. Bruce is the co-founding partner of Savitt Bruce & Willey LLP and served as a Senior Assistant City Attorney for the City of Seattle.) As discussed in the prior post in this series, although Government entities generally have important legal defenses in cases involving natural disasters and disaster relief, the more ...

Part One (This is the first of two articles based on David Bruce’s presentation to the 2018 Annual Meeting of the League of California Cities.  Mr. Bruce is the co-founding partner of Savitt Bruce & Willey LLP and served as a Senior Assistant City Attorney for the City of Seattle.) Landslides, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis.  Natural disasters happen—and by all accounts are occurring more frequently and causing devastation and the loss of human life and property. The National Oceanic ...

Mr. David Bruce will present “Making Your Case” as part of a one-day seminar on Landslides sponsored by the Seminar Group, October 25th 2018, at the Washington Athletic Club. This seminar is an opportunity for attorneys, claims professionals, and others to learn the nuts and bolts of landslides in Washington. Slope movement events in western Washington have become more frequent and more severe over the last few decades. These, in turn, have led to more landslide litigation, enhanced oversight, and regulation of ...

Washington’s Public Records Act (“PRA”) mandates the broad disclosure of public records in furtherance of the public policy of government transparency.[1]  Under the PRA, the media and ordinary citizens can request and obtain government records to stay informed about how their government is serving the public’s interest.  Government agencies must respond to these requests by conducting reasonable searches for responsive records, communicating with requestors, and providing the records for inspection and copying unless they are exempt from disclosure ...

To what extent does the attorney-client privilege[1] exempt from disclosure under Washington’s Public Records Act[2] billing statements submitted to government agencies by outside litigation counsel? The privilege protects “communications incident to the giving and receiving of legal advice, and incident to the representation of the client’s legal interests.”[3] This includes attorney-client communications about relevant facts. As the Washington Supreme Court has noted, “‘[a] fact is one thing and a communication concerning that fact ...

On April 12, Judge Laura Middaugh dismissed an Initiative 91 challenge to the Memorandum of Understanding among the City of Seattle, King County and Chris Hansen's ArenaCo, providing another "assist" to the return of the NBA to Seattle. We are proud to be a part of this: we represented King County, and led the efforts to brief and argue the motion to dismiss. Read the motion to dismiss here, and see the coverage here.