BRIEFS
SUPER LAWYERS
SIMPLY THE BEST
SIMEON OSBORN LANDS A RECORD SETTLEMENT FOR A MAN INJURED
BY A KING COUNTY DEPUTY BY REBEKAH DENN
One of Sim Osborn’s recent prospective
clients was a guy who played on his boyhood
Little League team. Another knew his name
from high school.
It seems that everyone who has met
Osborn remembers him.
“There weren’t a whole lot of lawyers
coming out of my neighborhood,” quips
Osborn, who grew up in a blue-collar
neighborhood in Shoreline. He played a lot
of sports, grew up in a big family—with three
brothers and a sister—and, even back then,
was the kind of guy people came to when
they had a problem.
Today, at 53, Osborn is a successful
personal injury attorney at Osborn Machler,
and recently won the largest individual
settlement on record from King County—$10
million for a man badly injured in a run-in
with a sheriff’s deputy. Osborn has built a
big-league reputation for handling injury
and wrongful death cases. But his modest
roots still play a major role in his attitude
toward life and work.
With personal injury cases, “you get to
represent people who can’t normally afford
lawyers,” he says. “It’s not usually the doctor
or lawyer—though that happens. The guy
who gets hurt usually is the mail carrier
or the milkman, the lady who works at the
dry cleaners, and they can’t afford to pay a
lawyer by the hour. Those are the kinds of
people you get to help. It’s a good deal.”
The case of Chris Harris and his wife,
Sarah, began in 2009, when a witness
mistakenly identified Harris as being
involved in an alleged assault at a Belltown
convenience store. A deputy chased Harris,
who ran, and the officer slammed him into
a wall, leaving him paralyzed and brain-
injured. The deputies were not wearing
standard uniforms, and a paramedic
who treated Harris, then 29, at the scene
testified that he had not initially realized
they were officers.
