We need a lawyer who can find the defendant and a paralegal who can find the one page that matters.
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. More than thirty years on, we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Cyclospora, Vibrioand botulism, tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms and Boar’s Head. There is more work than there are people to do it, and we are hiring two of them.
Where the work stands. As I write this, on September 19, 2026, CDC has closed the iceberg lettuce Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms at 12,883 sick in 21 states. Its own national count is 19,883 confirmed cases. That leaves 7,000 confirmed cases nobody has tied to a food, and this fall we will be working with epidemiologists to find where they came from. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa has sickened 431 people in 32 states; the grower still has not been named, the recall has spread to more than 160 grocery products, and we filed the first lawsuit in August. Salmonella from a Ramona, California deli and the egg farm that supplied it, with three complaints on file. Two sprout outbreaks at once. Infant botulism against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria from Boar’s Head. E. coli from raw goat milk, raw milk cheese, romaine and frozen blueberries. Every one of those numbers is a person with a chart, a bill, a lien and a phone number. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.
Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. The lawyers here 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 the Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown. The paralegals get those records in the first place: public records requests to state and county health departments, FOIA to FDA, CDC and USDA, and some of it in Spanish, a real plus. 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.
The other half of the office 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. That file had to be built by somebody. This month: citizen petitions to FDA, now being drafted, for a warning label on raw sprouts and for botulism testing in powdered infant formula, the second with twenty-four parents of hospitalized babies; comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028; and a standing demand that CDC keep counting Cyclospora, which it stopped updating weekly on September 15. I publish Food Safety News, have written over 6,000 posts here since 2004, and teach at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. People here get their names on that work. Lawyers write here under their own names, where reporters read it, and anyone who wants to speak or write about the work is pushed forward, not held back. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.
What you will not do here. No billable hours, no timesheets 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. No committee, and no layer between you and the person who decides; when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And 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.
Where you will do it. Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and we want you living here, not commuting here. 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. But the right person 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 you get here.
The associate attorney: at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal or complex tort — and ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them; you carry your own docket from the start. You will file in federal and state courts across the country; write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases, with the medical chronology, the liability analysis and the damages model all yours; take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists; work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis with the best experts in the field; sit with families in hospital rooms; and try cases. You will be on airplanes. You need a license in good standing somewhere and admissibility pro hac vice everywhere else (Washington admission is not required), real deposition experience, the writing to draft a complaint reporters quote, and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus; we will teach you the microbiology.
The paralegal: at least ten years in plaintiffs’ personal injury or complex litigation. Ten years, because you already know what a lien is, what a hospital billing department will and will not send you, and how to keep sixty clients straight without losing one — and because nobody here will look over your shoulder. You will run your own files: intakes with families who are frightened and exhausted, medical records chased and chronologized, the damages and lien files that become the settlement demand, e-discovery and document productions, calendaring and cite-checking, coordination with experts and health departments, FDA and USDA dockets tracked and comments filed on deadline, and travel with us when a case goes to trial. You need mastery of medical records and chronologies, e-discovery platform experience, absurd organizational instincts, and genuine kindness on the phone: the person calling you may have just buried someone.
The children’s cases belong to both jobs. Many of our clients are children, and the last step on their cases is the hardest. A child’s settlement 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 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 for the associate; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, Jeff Benedict’s book about this work and the Netflix documentary that followed. Read the book and watch the documentary before you apply.
One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area or a file-management job. 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. Being that somebody is the job, for the lawyer and the paralegal both. The people who last here can still name the child a year after the case settles, and they are still angry that any of it happened. I am not looking for someone who wants a job. I am looking for someone who cannot look away from it.
How to apply. Both jobs are open now. Send a resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com. Associates, add a writing sample, and in the note pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. Paralegals, tell me about the hardest lien you ever cleared or the record you had to fight hardest to get. marlerclark.com and billmarler.com if you want to know more before you write. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.