Jeffrey Campiche

Jeffrey Campiche grew up in Ilwaco, Washington, fishing and duck hunting on the bays and rivers, and crewed on Dungeness crab and Columbia River gillnet boats before deciding against life as a commercial fisherman. In college he saw what lawyers could do for individual people and resolved never to work for corporations or insurers. “I always wanted to help the individual person,” he says. In law school he turned down law review to clerk for Oregon criminal defense lawyer Tom Odinell, who died a month before Campiche graduated.

Campiche came to maritime law from inside the maritime world. After eight years as prosecutor and coroner in Pacific County, where he saw how many people died at sea, he joined a Seattle personal injury firm and within a month was hired on two Bering Sea cases, a deckhand losing his leg and a widow whose husband drowned. The Inland Boatmen’s Union made him designated counsel for injured tugboat and ferry workers under the Jones Act, and fishermen he went to high school with still call him.

The case of Tommy Le, a 90-pound, 18-year-old from White Center who was shot by King County sheriff’s deputies who claimed he attacked them with a knife. In Tommy’s bedroom Campiche found a worn chess set and library copies of The Count of Monte Cristo and Faust. The autopsy showed Tommy was shot twice in the back; no knife was ever found, only a plastic ink pen. After the Ninth Circuit called the county’s appeal frivolous and sanctioned its lawyers, the county paid $5 million as trial approached.

Campiche credits two mentors. His father, a doctor, taught him that “we are in professions first, business second,” and whenever Campiche reported a big fee his father asked only how he had helped the client. Trial lawyer George Kargianas taught him courtesy: in a railroad crossing case, Kargianas gently cross-examined a surprise 15-year-old witness until the boy admitted he had not seen the crash, and the jury never turned on him. Campiche says being respectful even of opponents has made his practice more successful.

Campiche earned his J.D. from the University of Oregon School of Law. A week before classes started he clerked for ACLU lawyer Jake Tanzer on a Mississippi civil rights suit over a voter registration worker who vanished after a sheriff picked him up, an experience that cemented his interest in civil rights work. After law school he returned home and was appointed, then elected, county prosecutor of Pacific County, Washington, serving from 1978 to 1986 while also acting as county coroner.

His father, a physician in Long Beach, Washington, brought him his first medical negligence case: a 30-year-old single mother whose Seattle doctor had dismissed a breast lump as a cyst because she was “too young” for cancer. Campiche won, though she lived only a few more years. Next came a Yakima infant left quadriplegic after an ophthalmologist treated a bacterial eye infection as a bug bite; on Campiche’s first videotaped deposition, the doctor blamed “dirty” Mexican homes, and the judge ruled the jury could hear it.

Campiche is the founding partner of Campiche Andrews Horne PLLC (campichelaw.com) in Seattle, Washington, where his practice covers maritime injury and death, personal injury, medical negligence and civil rights litigation. Seattle Met Magazine featured him in “Seattle’s Top Lawyers” in 2010, and he holds the highest ratings for legal ability and ethical standards from Lawyers.com and Martindale-Hubbell. He is an Eagle member of the Washington State Association for Justice and published “Product Liability and the People’s Republic of China” in Trial News in 2017.