In April, attorneys representing the state of Washington were dealt a stunning defeat in a lawsuit over the death of a 2-year-old Pierce County girl.
After a five-week trial, a jury found the state liable for the death of Sarai Brooks, awarding $130 million to the toddler’s surviving siblings and family. It was the largest wrongful death jury award of its kind in state history.
Brooks was killed in 2022 by her mother’s boyfriend after Washington’s child-welfare agency returned her to the home despite past abuse concerns that had led the agency to temporarily remove her and place her in a shelter. Her treatment in the final months of her life was described as “torture” and a veteran detective called it “the worst case of child abuse” she’d ever seen.
The resulting $130 million verdict, which the state has appealed, added to a fast-growing stack of lawsuit payouts that set a record $614 million over the past year.
It also spotlighted another aspect of the growing legal tab for taxpayers: skyrocketing payouts to private law firms.
The state’s lawyers in the Sarai Brooks lawsuit, Allison Croft and Melissa Nelson, did spend years in the state attorney general’s office, but now work at the law firm Simmons Sweeney Freimund Smith Tardif.
They’re among a growing cadre of private lawyers hired to assist with the deluge of lawsuits over alleged failures of Washington’s child-welfare system.
Over the past fiscal year, the state spent $43.6 million for outside legal help. The tab for such contracts has quintupled since 2023, when it totaled $8.7 million. In 2020, the state paid just $283,000, public records show.
Those private lawyers bill at rates that in some cases exceed $300 an hour, making them far more costly than the assistant attorneys general employed directly by the state, who do essentially the same work.
The state’s hiring of expensive private lawyers has not noticeably bent Washington’s liability cost curve. Even as the state pays more attorneys, it keeps shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements and verdicts — with no sign that either trend is slowing down.
Washington taxpayers are projected to be on the hook for $4.4 billion in lawsuit costs in coming years, based on cases already in the legal pipeline, according to an actuarial analysis.
Scott Barbara, chief of the civil division for Attorney General Nick Brown’s office, said the state has little choice but to hire private legal help given the sheer volume of cases, mostly against the Department of Children, Youth and Families.
“Every lawsuit has to be defended,” Barbara said in an interview with The Seattle Times. “Is it more expensive? Absolutely.”
“There is no expectation that their [the private attorneys’] performance is going to be different from the work of the assistant attorneys general. We look to them to be handling the cases responsibly, competently, consistently,” he added.
The state torts division, which handles civil lawsuits, has about 600 active cases assigned to outside “capacity” attorneys, Barbara said. That’s up from just four cases handled by outside attorneys in 2019.
The state simply doesn’t have enough lawyers to handle all those cases on its own.
The attorney general’s office civil division has about 200 full-time employees, including 66 attorneys, according to Barbara. Filling those lawyer jobs has been an issue, he said, as salaries for the most experienced assistant attorneys general top out at $157,000. The unit has 11 vacancies.
“They literally can’t do it all,” said Daniel Hsieh, president of the Association of Washington Assistant Attorneys General, the union representing the state’s attorneys.
“Would I love for the state to bring all of that work in house? Absolutely,” Hsieh said. But he acknowledged that isn’t feasible given the volume of cases and the difficulty in filling state jobs.
He estimated it would take 70 or 80 additional attorneys to handle the load. “And that’s giving them manageable caseloads,” he said, plus paralegals and other support employees.
Simmons Sweeney Freimund, which handled the Brooks case, was the top recipient of state outside-counsel contracts over the past year, getting paid nearly $8 million, public records show.
The civil defense firm, which has offices in Seattle, Olympia and Bellingham, was co-founded by longtime attorney general’s office lawyers. Its partners now bill the state at $300 an hour, with associate attorneys billing $250 an hour, according to the attorney general’s office.
That’s cheap compared with Markowitz Herbold, a Portland-based trial law firm that was paid the second-most — nearly $6 million — for state legal work last year. The firm’s partners bill $690 an hour, with associate attorneys billing $490 or more, according to the attorney general’s office.
Many of the lawyers hired to defend the state formerly worked as assistant attorneys general before leaving for the private sector.
At Simmons Sweeney Friemund, for example, both Croft and Nelson previously spent decades at the attorney general’s office, leading the legal defense of state agencies, before hopping the fence to the private sector to do much the same work. Croft joined in 2020 and is a partner, while Nelson came aboard in 2024 and is an associate attorney, according to their online biographies.
Like other state-hired private attorneys, Croft and Nelson are designated as “special assistant attorneys general” working under contracts. Both declined interview requests, referring questions to the attorney general’s office.
In the Sarai Brooks case, it’s not clear whether any amount of lawyering — private or public — could have gotten the state completely off the hook. Testimony in the lawsuit included the admission by a social worker that she’d made mistakes and should have done more during home visits before Brooks’ death.
Still, Ray Dearie, the attorney for Brooks’ surviving siblings, said the state could have settled the case for “a fraction” of what the jury ultimately awarded.
“The state was in a world of trouble trying to defend this,” Dearie said. “I always assumed that of any case in my entire career this was one that was going to settle.” Instead, Dearie said the state offered “lowball BS compensation — like no one in my profession could take their offer.”
Attorneys don’t make settlement decisions on their own, he noted, pointing to state officials who as clients would ultimately have to make the call.
While the precise details of such settlement talks are not public, once the case went to trial, Dearie sought damages of $175 million, court records show. The state’s lawyers argued that if any damages were justified, they should total $5 million.
On April 7, the jury awarded $130 million, apportioning 90% to the state and 10% to a Puyallup daycare center where staff saw Sarai Brooks with a black eye and other injuries, but failed to report them before Brooks’ death.
Croft and Nelson filed a motion for a new trial, arguing the $130 million award was “unquestionably outside the range of substantial evidence, fueled by passion and prejudice, and punitive, rather than compensatory.”
The plea was rejected by Pierce County Superior Court Judge Ingrid McLeod, who wrote that the state got a fair trial and lost. The state has appealed the verdict to the Court of Appeals.
Such huge verdicts and other spiking legal costs have led Democrats in the Legislature to consider steps that would once have been unthinkable given their ties with trial lawyers, including new limits on the abuse lawsuits that are contributing to the state’s larger budget shortfalls.
“We cannot continue to go up at this increase of paying billions of dollars that the state cannot afford,” Brown said in a recent TVW interview, though he did not specify actions he’d support.
A 14-member tort study committee is drafting a report with recommendations to Gov. Bob Ferguson and lawmakers ahead of the 2027 legislative session. Those could include damage caps and funneling lawsuits involving abuse from decades ago through a compensation fund instead of courts.
Such proposals are expected to draw fierce resistance from plaintiffs attorneys and advocates for abuse survivors, who argue lawmakers should focus on correcting flaws in the child-welfare system that have allowed abuse to happen.
“Why not actually try to correct the problem itself?” Dearie said.
Hsieh, the union representative, also hopes progress is made on boosting pay for the attorney general’s office so it can attract and retain lawyers and rely, at least a little less, on the private law firms.
He pointed to a salary study by the Office of Financial Management which showed pay for assistant attorney generals lags 20% or more behind their peers in other states.
“We could be out in practice making more money,” Hsieh said. “We are not asking for millions, but just something that keeps up with inflation.”
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
