Bill Barton is honored to join the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame, an elite list including Johnnie Cochran Jr, Moe Levine and Thurgood Marshall. Barton is only the second member from the Northwest, following retired attorney Paul Luvera of Seattle, Washington.
He credits Brent Barton, his partner and son, for continuing the firm’s track record of legal excellence. He believes that maintaining a limited case inventory helps bring small-town service while delivering big-city results for his clients.
About the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame
The Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame, housed at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, exists to honor the trial lawyers whose careers changed the practice itself. According to their website:
Throughout American history, exceptional trial lawyers have exceeded the expectations of the public and their peers by clearly establishing themselves, through their practice, as true champions and crusaders for American justice.
To honor these legendary trial lawyers, the National Trial Lawyers Association established the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. Each year, the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame recognizes and honors these few remarkable individuals, both past and present, who have left an indelible mark on the American legal tradition through a lifetime of service to the American public, the Constitution, and the American trial bar.
Bill is only the second inductee ever from the Northwest. The first was Paul Luvera, the retired Seattle attorney whose name still carries weight in every plaintiff’s firm on this side of the country. For a lawyer who has spent 45 years working out of Newport, Oregon—a coastal town of only about 10,000 people—that’s a remarkable place to land.
A Legacy of Greatness
To date, Bill has brought more than 500 jury trials, as well as five hundred trial advocacy lectures delivered across 35 states and four countries. He is the past president of the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association, the Western Trial Lawyers Association, and the Oregon chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. A member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Bill has been listed among the The Best Lawyers in America in three separate categories. He was named a Super Lawyer every year from 2006 to 2021, including repeated appearances in Oregon’s top ten.
A few notable cases behind those numbers are what earned his induction into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. Bill was the first attorney to file a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America and take one of those cases to trial instead of quietly settling it. That decision established precedent in psychological injury litigation that other lawyers have been building on ever since. The Boy Scouts organization now faces roughly 82,000 claims, and every one of them traces back to the door that Bill opened.
Bil also represented the first client in the country to sue the Vatican for sexual abuse. Suing a sovereign state on behalf of an individual survivor was, at the time, something close to unthinkable—and Bill did it anyway. Along the way he wrote Recovering for Psychological Injuries, now in its third edition. He is also the author of many other books, articles and webinars on related topics.
Sharing Knowledge with The Next Generation
Bill cares deeply about trial lawyers learning from his experience and continuing his legacy. His book, Integrated Advocacy, was written for exactly that audience: lawyers who want to be trial lawyers. Bill also runs a Portland boot camp for young lawyers to teach them how to actually try cases. Bill has taught as adjunct faculty at Willamette University College of Law and served on the faculty of the Center for International Legal Studies.
He’s also served as a state trial judge pro tem, chaired a captive mutual insuring Oregon attorneys, and chaired the Child Abuse Litigation Group of the American Association for Justice. In 2002, the Oregon Trial Lawyers’ new lawyers section gave him an Award of Appreciation: a young lawyers’ thank-you note that says as much as any of the bigger honors.
In the meantime, his own legal work continues: medical malpractice, birth injury, catastrophic injury, and sexual abuse cases, taken just a few at a time, tried by lawyers who still believe a jury will do the right thing when someone finally tells them the whole story. Bill Barton has spent four and a half decades arguing that the law is a tool for making the world safer than he found it.
