Eric Fong

Eric Fong is a plaintiff trial lawyer and the founder of Fong Law, a civil practice in Port Orchard, Washington where he represents people injured by corporations and government entities. His work centers on catastrophic personal injury and premises liability, and his practice holds two of the largest compensatory verdicts in Washington state.

Fong did not set out to practice law. He went to law school because education was expected in his family, graduated without offers and took the only job available to him: a public defender position in Bremerton, Washington, at $24,000 a year in 1996. Standing in front of his first jury, he found the work he was built for.

For 11 years he essentially lived in the courtroom, at times setting five or six cases for trial in a single week as misdemeanors grew into felonies and felonies into federal cases. The lawyer who hired him gave him one instruction: don’t settle cases, try them.

He went through Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College at Thunderhead Ranch in 2001 and taught there for years. What he took from it was less a matter of technique than of self-knowledge — the harder work of getting past the expectations layered on a person since childhood so that what they say to a jury is genuinely their own.

His civil practice carries two of the largest compensatory verdicts in Washington state, including a $91 million premises liability verdict against a 24-hour convenience store that ignored laws meant to protect the people inside it; he takes as much pride in the training and insurance changes the verdict prompted as in the number. As a young public defender, he took a series of consolidated criminal trespass cases to the Washington Supreme Court in City of Bremerton v. Widell, winning reversal of several convictions and establishing that a tenant’s invitation is a defense to trespass in public housing. He is also candid about the losses that come with trial work and the weight the profession asks its lawyers to carry.