According to her professional bio, she’s a “product of the MTV generation.” That’s the one sometimes known as the “slacker generation.” But Karen Koehler is no slacker. At 47, she is president of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association (WSTLA). She doesn’t expect her full caseload at Seattle’s Stritmatter Kessler Whelan Coluccio to shrink during her yearlong term.
“I have three full-time jobs,” says Koehler, a plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer. “I don’t think WSTLA has ever had a single parent as president. They’ll learn that, even this year, with all we have on our plate, my children deserve a full-time mommy and that’s what they’ll get.”
Koehler’s term will be remembered for the stunning victory last fall for Referendum 67, which insurance companies hurried to put on the ballot in hopes of dumping the Insurance Fair Conduct Act, a bipartisan bill hammered out in the governor’s office and passed by the 2007 Legislature. It lets policyholders sue for triple damages when an insurer denies a legitimate claim.
The Reject R-67 (pro–insurance industry) forces had raised more than $11.4 million by Nov. 7, while the Approve 67 campaign came up with $3 million, according to a Seattle Times report.
The “No to R-67” TV ads, which Koehler describes as “totally wicked” with anti-lawyer rhetoric, went up early, while the “yes” campaign had to wait “until we saw the whites of their eyes,” says Koehler. “It was the first time the insurance industry duked it out with lawyers without middlemen like doctors in between. They tried to do it under the guise of Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates, which outraged people because they weren’t consumers—they were insurance companies.” In the end, voters rejected the industry’s arguments and approved the measure with about 57 percent of the vote.
It was a sweet victory for Koehler, who, along with longtime WSTLA staffers Gerhard Letzing and Larry Shannon, spent the summer hitting the road around the state advocating for the measure. Koehler has been involved in WSTLA for years—she was its 2005 Trial Lawyer of the Year—and, in 2006, as president-elect, she served on every committee. She is active in lobbying the Legislature for personal injury and insurance issues.
Koehler is also heavily involved in the education and mentoring that WSTLA offers its membership. “This is a tough practice area,” she says. “At around 3,000 members, we’re the largest specialty Bar in the state—and definitely the most political.” “I didn’t set out in WSTLA to do politics; I set out to do legal [work],” she says. But in presiding over WSTLA, she doesn’t have the luxury of being aloof from the political fray.
“We’re completely politically dependent and driven,” she says. “All it takes is a swooping in [of outside interests], a major tampering with our judicial bench or substantive changing of our tort laws to monumentally affect our ability to represent injured people.” In 2005, WSTLA helped defeat the $10 million to $12 million insurance-industry campaign to pass Initiative 330, which would have capped medical malpractice awards.
“The medical malpractice issue is stable for now,” Koehler says, “but big insurance always has a slew of bills they try to introduce that we’re constantly having to fight back on.”
The trial lawyers say their opponents have plenty of money of their own, as was seen in the strongly partisan state Supreme Court races in 2006. “Making a political agenda for all of our courts is very troubling,” Koehler says.
Not too long ago, she notes, “our supreme and appellate court races regularly had incumbent judges with no opponents—you hardly ever have that any more. Opponents are coming out against these incumbent judges for political reasons.”
Plaintiff’s personal injury law is a political lightning rod. Trial lawyers have long been labeled as ambulance–chasers by Republicans who, along with the insurance industry, push for malpractice-suit caps.
The fact that trial lawyers both nationally and in the state are some of the Democrats’ largest donors can’t be kept out of the political equation.
“One could make a good argument,” says Koehler, “that their [trial lawyers’ opponents’] true goal is to defund the Democrats’ biggest campaign source.”
Besides the leadership jobs she has taken at WSTLA and the Washington State Bar Association, Koehler is known as an innovative personal injury lawyer who takes difficult and unusual cases.
“These cases just seem to find me,” she says. She accounts for her successes as a result of being in the courtroom more than most civil attorneys: “If I don’t think a settlement offer’s fair, I don’t keep on negotiating, I just take it to trial.”
In Koehler’s “spare time,” she’s written four weighty texts on such topics as “Litigating Major Automobile Injury and Death Cases” and “Minor Impact Soft Tissue Cases.” She’s published dozens of articles and regularly lectures attorneys throughout the country on issues ranging from trial practice to insurance company tactics. Bill Bailey, with Seattle’s Fury Bailey, is Koehler’s teaching partner and fellow adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He says, “Karen is brilliant in the right brain and the left brain. She’s one of the most insightful human beings I’ve worked with in the legal profession.
“She can intuit what people are thinking and feeling by their posture, gestures and by cryptic statements they make. She can pull out of the air what motivates human beings to make decisions.”
Koehler proved the city of Seattle’s mishandling of the 2001 Mardi Gras riots in Pioneer Square, winning a $1.75 million wrongful-death settlement for the family of 20-year-old Kristopher Kime, who was beaten to death while Seattle police stayed along the perimeter of the mob. Roving groups of kids with brass knuckles and skateboards beat bystanders.
Koehler is known for putting on a nothing-barred defense, no matter how puny the case may be—or, as King County Superior Court Judge Bruce Hilyer recently wrote, having “a Cadillac approach to a Chevrolet case.”
She is also renowned for novel defenses.
Lori Welnick, wife of the late Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead’s keyboard player, was once riding in a car in downtown Seattle that was rammed by another car. Injured, Welnick had given up on her doctors and was living in pain, depressed and unable to help her husband as he wrote music. Koehler and co-counsel Michael Withey were arguing loss of consortium, but feared she wouldn’t come off sympathetically to the jury. “I just knew they weren’t going to like her—not going to understand her. I was afraid they’d think she was just a prima donna,” says Koehler.
She asked herself: What’s the theme here? The answer, she realized, was that it was about the music—it was a rock–’n–roll trial.
So she and Withey got Judge Dean Lum to allow a piano in court and Vince Welnick to sing a song that Lori Welnick had helped him write before the accident.
Opposing attorney Bill Spencer of Murray Dunham & Murray says Koehler is a total professional and a congenial adversary; he laughs today but says, “I went crazy at the time ... and made a strenuous objection about the sideshow nature of it.”
It was a great moment for Koehler. “The jury just loved them. We helped them understand that the Welnicks were not normal people, but they were deserving just the same.” The jury entered a verdict for three times the defense’s final offer.
A Seattle native, Koehler worked as a paralegal in the solo office of her lawyer mother, Mary Fung Koehler, during high school and college. After law school at Seattle University and University of Puget Sound, she practiced at the predecessor firm to Diamond & Sylvester, doing defense work, then worked part time at the law office of now-state Supreme Court Justice Tom Chambers when her first baby was born.
“When my youngest [of three] went to kindergarten, I decided to do it again full time.” She made another decision: “I decided to be a plaintiff lawyer, not to do any more defense.” She was in solo practice for a few years, then in a two-attorney partnership with Pat LePley doing personal injury work before joining Stritmatter Kessler Whelan Colucci in 2004.
During those early years back in full-time practice, Koehler divorced and became a single parent. “Earning an income on a contingency-fee basis—try that one on!” she says with a laugh.
Chambers, who continues to be a mentor, says, “Karen is one of the smartest people I’ve ever run into. You know how the kids say you’re either book smart or street smart? Karen is both. She must read 2,000 words per minute. She’s so fast, she grasps things incredibly quickly, and she can handle so many different tasks at the same time.”
A few years ago, Koehler produced an instructional videotape designed for lawyers to show their clients before depositions. She wrote the script, directed it and acted in it. “I had a cameo appearance,” says Chambers. “I was the judge. It turned out to be an excellent tool for lawyers. It’s just another example of how Karen is involved in projects outside her usual realm.”
With her eldest daughter now attending Gonzaga University, and the other two approaching college age, that will likely mean more time spent in the legal community. It’s time-consuming, but she says she’s not the only one donating lots of time.
“WSTLA has so many people who do the same thing I do and feel passionately about the same things that I do,” says Koehler. “I fell in love with the organization. There’s no explanation besides love why anyone would do this.” L&P
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