Commitment to Community in Seattle

Transcript

Maren Norton
Partner, Litigation

I think there are several things that are every day changing the landscape in Seattle and it's broader and it impacts the legal community and within the legal community itself. So I think from a very broad perspective, the world is changing. So the things that policy is ever changing, the regulatory landscape is shifting and morphing by day. So every single day we're asked as a firm, and on behalf of our clients to respond to those things and to be up on them, to know what's happening, to be aware of what's happening in the world around us, and importantly, in individual industry segments that we serve each and every day.

So if you take that sort of broad picture and you overlay that on specific to the city I love, my hometown, where I get the privilege of being the Office Managing Partner here in Seattle, there's a couple of key things that we see every single day, and that is a lot of efforts to bring back our city. So Seattle has gone through like a lot of cities, some challenges in the recent past, and we're watching our clients and our community regrow and redevelop and change kind of how we look at the world around us and also how we look at redeveloping our city. So this impacts us not only from a sense of where are we servants in the community, where do our passions lie, where do our kids go to school, all the things that we bring to work with us every single day, but also our clients. One of our key industry sectors in Seattle is real estate. So we look out our windows of our offices and we see our clients and day-to-day their struggles, their successes each and every day.

We also see it in sort of the pro bono and the community service work we do. We work with Westside Baby and other places that are providing services in our community that are in greater need than ever before in many ways. And then we see it in sort of our day-to-day walk down the street. How do we get to work? The buses, the transit, Sound Transit, you name it. How do we get to work and who are the people we interact with on our pathway to work every day? So we're invested as a firm, of course, in helping to play a role in that, both on behalf of our clients, but as people and as neighbors and as colleagues.