02/01/2023
We are profoundly sad to announce the passing of our founding law partner, Arthur Swanson. For law partners Todd Gardner and Peter Meyers, aside from their own parents, Art was their most loved and important mentor, both personally and professionally. Art was also, in his 88th year, building a terrific mentoring relationship with our the firm’s newest partner, Dylan Cohon. Despite his retirement in the late 1990s, Art was involved with the work and life of our firm on a weekly basis and we will all dearly miss his love and guidance. It is impossible to fully describe how truly important Art was to each of us here at Swanson Gardner Meyers.
Above all else, Art was a fierce advocate for our firm’s clients and its employees. From the firm’s founding in the 1970s, Art created a culture here that values hardworking, conscientious, loyal employees who we treat as family. He believed, as we do, in giving our legal staff the responsibility and authority to get things done for our clients. Art was a wonderful listener and gave his time and attention generously.
Art built one of the original solo plaintiff practices in King County and he was of a generation whose work ethic was forged in difficult economic circumstances. He was born in South Dakota in 1934 during the Great Depression where his family were farmers and sheep herders. To escape the Dust Bowl, they moved when Art was a year old to Long Beach, Washington. His father worked in the sawmills in South Bend. His mother maintained the family property in Raymond until her passing only a few years ago. Art attended Willapa Valley High School in Raymond where he played basketball and football despite contracting polio at the age of 15, which compromised one of his legs.
Art went straight to Washington State University out of high school and graduated in 1956. He was in the Air Force ROTC, but served in the US Army after the Air Force washed him out because of his leg. In the Army, Art proved to be a talented rifleman and made the Fourth Army Rifle Team, competing in the nationals at Fort Chaffee. He was proud of his military service, and the walls of his office here at the firm have always displayed his medals and other momentos of his time in the Army.
Art worked for a short time as an insurance adjuster for Crawford & Company before attending law school at the University of Washington, graduating in 1963. He then served in the King County Prosecutor’s Office, working for Charles O. Carroll. Art went into civil practice in about 1965, first with Shellan, Payne, Stone & Swanson and then as a solo practitioner.
Art earned many honors during the course of his legal career and was a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, among others. But Art was most proud of building a successful law practice from nothing and successfully representing hundreds of individual clients over the course of his long career. Many of those clients kept in touch with Art and the firm for decades after their cases concluded.
By the early 1970s, Art had moved his solo practice to a small brick house at the present location of our firm on Talbot Road in Renton, just down the street from what is now Valley Medical Center. Always a personal injury practice since its early days, Art also developed important and valued relationships with the law enforcement community, including the Renton Police Department and the Washington State Patrol.
We know there are many friends and colleagues and former clients who are as heartbroken as we are to hear this news. Art was a lifelong advocate in every sense of that word and he treasured his colleagues and friends in the legal profession. Despite retiring in the late 1990s, he never lost his love for the legal practice or his interest in our cases and our work and the many characters that work involves. We will dearly miss the occasional “woodshedding” each of us received when Art felt we were not on the right track – an Art Swanson woodshedding is a badge of honor we cherish around here.
Todd and Dylan and I will remember these lessons and Art’s wisdom always: keep the firm small, build staff loyalty by treating them as family, outwork your opponents at everything and fight hard for each and every client. He was a generous man, had a keen sense of humor, had a joy for the practice of law, and he was a dog guy.
Art is survived by his wife Ann, his son Dean, his daughters Shelby and Sherry, his brother Don, and his Rottweiler, Torpedo. We will keep you informed of plans to celebrate his life.
