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 people 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.
What is on the desk right now
As I write this, on September 9, 2026: CDC counts 19,595 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in this country since May 1 — 1,043 hospitalized, two dead, 49 states and the District of Columbia — against 1,180 for all of last season. Another 9,355 confirmed cases are still being sorted, and CDC is aware of at least 6,149 more. Our own tally of the state dashboards runs north of 32,000. We have six cases on file against Taco Bell, four different franchise operators and Taylor Farms, and more than three 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, a recall that has spread past 160 grocery products, and a grower still not publicly named. Infant botulism litigation against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria out of Boar’s Head. E. coli O157:H7 from beef kofta and from romaine, O145 in frozen blueberries, Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs, Vibrio from raw seafood in Queens and E. coli and Salmonella in sprouts – again. 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. Somebody in this office reads the FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, the USDA establishment records, the whole genome sequencing and the PulseNet clusters, the epidemic curves built by state epidemiologists and — this summer — the sanitation and rainfall records of a Mexican municipality where lettuce was grown. That work gets done before a 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.
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, and that file had to be built by somebody. We helped pass FSMA in 2011, petitioned in 2019 — so far without success — to have outbreak strains of Salmonella declared adulterants, 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, comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028, and a standing demand that CDC count Cyclospora again. I publish this site, and people here get their names on the work and are pushed forward to write and speak about it, not held back. Cases fix one company. The rest fixes the industry.
The associate attorney — five years or more
Personal injury, product liability, med-mal or complex tort, and ready to run cases rather than paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them, so you will carry your own docket from the start: file in federal and state courts around the country, write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases before anyone sees a courtroom — medical chronology, liability analysis, damages model, all of it yours — take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists, work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeriameningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis cases with the best experts in the field, sit with families in hospital rooms, and try cases. Many of our clients are children, and there the last step 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 so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak damaged has to be replaced. Licensed and in good standing somewhere, admissible pro hac vice elsewhere; Washington admission is not required. Bring real deposition experience, the writing chops to draft a complaint reporters quote, and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus, not a requirement. We will teach you the microbiology.
The paralegal — ten years or more
In plaintiffs’ personal injury or complex litigation. Ten years, because we need someone who already knows 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. Ten years also because nobody here is going to look over your shoulder — you will run your own files. You will take intakes from families who are frightened and exhausted, chase and chronologize medical records, build the damages and lien files that become the settlement demand, assemble the minor’s compromise petitions that put a child’s settlement in front of a judge, manage e-discovery and document productions, coordinate with experts and state health departments, keep cases moving in courts in a dozen states, reconcile fifty health department dashboards in the morning, file the FOIA and public records requests, and put together exhibits and family declarations for a rulemaking petition or a congressional hearing. Bring mastery of medical records and chronologies, real lien experience — Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA plans and, more often than you would think, the federal government — e-discovery platform experience, absurd organizational instincts, and genuine kindness on the phone. The person calling you may have just buried someone.
Both jobs travel; the docket is national and sometimes international.
What you will not do here
No billable hours, no timesheets, and no origination credit to chase. Nobody here bills by the tenth of an hour, 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 the work happens
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 you can cross on foot. Most people who make the move do not move back. 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.
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 lawyer; and work that ends up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, the Netflix documentary about all of this. Watch it before you apply.
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, and 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. Being that somebody is the job, and it is going to be you as often as it is me. I am not looking for people who want a job. I am looking for the ones who cannot look away from this and want to spend the next thirty years making a difference.
Both jobs are open now. Resume and a short note to [email protected]. Lawyers, send a writing sample and tell me which case or outbreak on marlerblog.com you would pick up first and what you would do with it. Paralegals, tell me about the hardest lien you ever cleared or the record you had to fight hardest to get. The rest is public: marlerclark.com and billmarler.com. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.
