October 1999

See Dick Run, Watch Dick Go:

The Wiring of Our New Bar President

His perpetual movement strikes anyone watching Richard "Dick" Eymann sit through a meeting. When he is not moving his hands around to emphasize a point, he shifts in his seat, tapping his leg up and down to some inner beat. An observer is left wondering — what is this man thinking about that leaves him with such kinetic energy? Judging from his long list of accomplishments, his thoughts might be on organizing his next project or case.

A partner in the Spokane firm of Eymann, Allison, Hunter & Jones, Dick is a past President of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association (WSTLA), was WSTLA’s 1995 Trial Lawyer of the Year, and has served in numerous offices and committee chair-ships for WSTLA and the American Bar Association. His extremely successful trial practice emphasizes personal injury, wrongful death, fire loss, sexual abuse and assault, products liability, business torts and medical negligence. He is best known professionally for taking difficult cases to trial with little or no offer from defense counsel, and achieving surprising verdicts.

As the new President of the Washington State Bar Association, Dick is taking on the challenge of improving the public’s perception of lawyers. He believes the public sees lawyers as "dishonorable, hard, cold, greedy leeches on society." Eymann is sure that the opposite is true, that most lawyers’ hearts are "in the right place, not advocating for the almighty dollar, but advocating for their clients." He cites as proof many lawyers who have purposely downscaled in order to do more volunteer and community-service work. During his year as Bar President, he hopes to emphasize public legal education as much as possible, urging lawyers to do even more volunteering and pro bono work and finding new ways to counteract what he calls the "irresponsibility of the state legislature and Congress to fund legal-services programs."

Eymann’s access-to-justice roots run deep. Dick grew up on a farm near Mohawk, Oregon — the oldest of eight siblings and the only son of the former Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. He remembers his father as being a staunch defender of "have nots," fighting hard to keep state sales tax out of Oregon. His parents raised chickens, sheep, pigs and various crops. Every morning before school, he and his siblings collected approximately 4,000 eggs from the resident chickens, a chore Eymann blames for his continuing lack of appetite for eggs. Money was tight for the large family, especially every other year when his father would spend four to five months in Salem as a legislator. With no family money for college, Dick began his working career doing heavy physical labor on the short end of a Weyerhaeuser "green chain." A work scholarship with Oregon Senator Wayne Morse took him to Washington, D.C., where he moonlighted with the police department, helping to block demonstrators in the capital city even though he "believed in what they were doing."

Eymann graduated from the University of Oregon and was one of the youngest delegates at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He recalls seeing army jeeps and wire in front of his hotel, and being arrested for attempting to walk with fellow delegates to the convention hall as a protest to what he calls a police riot. He also has particularly vivid memories of watching a pre-teen boy being knocked off a small bridge by police, and himself being tear-gassed while in Eugene McCarthy headquarters. With the thought that his political science degree was "worthless" and with the military draft staring him in the face, he enlisted and became an intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. His orders to go to Vietnam were cancelled two days before he was supposed to leave, when President Nixon announced troop withdrawals.

After his Army stint, Eymann became a consumer fraud investigator in Washington, D.C., poking into every type of consumer fraud imaginable. He found the prosecutors handling the cases to be very overworked. But his enthusiasm for law as a career grew, and he started law school at Gonzaga University in 1973. While there, he and other students organized a very successful environmental law symposium, and the following year he was elected national vice president of the ABA’s Law Student Division.

Steve Jones, who has practiced with Dick in Spokane since 1979, describes him as being extremely creative in his practice and focused during trials, always knowing what’s important and what isn’t in trial preparation and presentation. Attorney Jim King, who has frequently been on the other side of court battles with Eymann, describes him as "damn good at what he does." King makes an extra effort to gear up for trial when Dick is the adversary. Jones cited as an example of Dick’s tendency to become absorbed during trials an occasion when Dick, heeding the call of nature, locked himself out of the office in the middle of the night while in his underwear. He had been practicing his closing argument at 3 a.m., sans most of his apparel, because a malfunction in the heating system had pushed the temperature into the 90s. Fortunately for all concerned, Dick was able to regain access (break in) to the office two hours later, before he was discovered by building security. Dick’s long-time assistant, Diane Latta, agrees that Dick gets tunnel vision while in the throes of trial preparation and tends to lose track of personal items, such as his checkbook and keys.

Another trait many who know him speak of is his thriftiness and eye for good value. He shops discount warehouses, stockpiles magazines until he has time to read them, buys used vehicles and makes MacGyver-like toys for his children out of common household objects. His wife, Susan, says he even insists that the family’s garbage be confined to one garbage can per week in order to save money and recycle as much as possible.

With all of Eymann’s concentration and focus on the practice of law, does he ignore the joys of everyday living? Au contraire. He manages to squeeze in 30 to 40 miles of running every week, and has one of the nicest gardens (including fruit trees) in his Spokane neighborhood. He enthusiastically clears away brush and weeds on his farm property and builds fires large enough to alarm the neighbors. He has also been a long-time volunteer with the Bloomsday Run in Spokane, coordinating all the media vehicles used during the race.

Clearly central in Dick’s busy life, though, is his young family. At the age of 54, he has a five-year-old daughter, Taylor Marie, and a three-year-old son, Houston. They are full of energy and obviously well attached to their father. While he jokes that at least at his age, he can finally afford children, his family obviously brings Dick the balance and perspective that is sometimes missing from a roller-coaster trial practice. He involves his children in planting and harvesting the large vegetable garden every summer, and enjoys playing with them indoors and out. He describes reading bedtime stories to his children and says it is the most relaxing and rewarding part of his day. At least there is one moment during each day when Dick’s mind is not racing faster than everyone else’s.

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