Eric Fong

Fong did not set out to practice law; he went to law school because education was expected in his family. He graduated from Seattle University School of Law in 1996 without offers and took the only job available, a public defender position in Bremerton, Washington, paying $24,000 a year. Standing in front of his first jury, he found the work he was built for. “When I was thrown into that courtroom, it found me,” he says. The lawyer who hired him gave one instruction: don't settle cases, try them.

Fong spent 11 years essentially living in the courtroom as a public defender, at times setting five or six cases for trial in a single week as misdemeanors grew into felonies and felonies into federal cases. He graduated from Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College at Thunderhead Ranch in 2001 and taught there from 2006 to 2025. What he took from it was self-knowledge more than technique: getting past the expectations layered on since childhood so that what he says to a jury is genuinely his own.

In Tisdale v. Apro LLC, a 2021 Pierce County premises liability case, Fong won a $91 million verdict for a customer beaten during a robbery at a 24-hour convenience store that ignored laws meant to protect employees and customers, one of the largest compensatory verdicts in Washington history. He takes as much pride in the training and insurance changes the verdict prompted as in the number. As a young public defender he also won City of Bremerton v. Widell in the Washington Supreme Court, establishing that a tenant's invitation is a defense to trespass in public housing.

Fong studied at Indiana University, finishing in 1993, and earned his J.D. from Seattle University School of Law in 1996, the year he was admitted to the Washington State Bar. He is also admitted in Colorado, before the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. District Courts for the Western and Eastern Districts of Washington and the District of Colorado, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He serves on the boards of Public Justice and the Western Trial Lawyers Association.

Fong Law is a civil practice in Port Orchard, Washington, with a website at ericfonglaw.com, where Fong represents people injured by corporations and government entities in catastrophic personal injury and premises liability cases. He was named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Washington State Association for Justice in 2022, Washington Defense Trial Lawyers in 2013 and Trial Lawyers College in 2003. In 2025 he won a $42 million verdict in Hilton v. Washington State Department of Corrections for the state's failure to protect a child from sexual abuse.