William J. Powell enrolled in law school just to see if he liked being a lawyer. It turned out he did.

Now, Powell, who graduated from the University of Washington's law school in 1956, has been practicing for 53 years, and continues today at the Spokane law firm Powell, Kuznetz & Parker PS.

At 77 years old, he has no plans to retire.

"Not as long as I've got my marbles about me," Powell quips.

After representing clients in hundreds of trials, the profession still draws him in, he says.

"Most lawyers would tell you it keeps you intellectually stimulated," says Powell. "It's an interesting profession—you deal with unusual happenings, human conflict, accidental happenings."

You never know who's going to come through the law office doors next in need of legal counsel, and that in itself can keep things interesting, he says.

Though Powell says he still practices a variety of types of law, since the 1970s he has handled cases mostly in employment law, helping clients who have been fired from a job or who believe they've been discriminated against. He's also done some personal injury cases, business litigation, and family law during that time. He says he's helped "make a lot of law" before the Washington state Supreme Court through legal precedent set in cases he's handled.

"That's how most law is made—case by case," he says.

After graduating from law school, Powell and his first wife, Ann, who was pregnant at the time, moved to Spokane on a near whim, not knowing much about the city where he would work so long. They knew it was medium-sized and that it wasn't Seattle, which Powell says "was not as nice of a city as it is now," with more than its share of rats and too much traffic for the young family's tastes then.

"I'd been there (Spokane) a couple times," he recalls. "I didn't know much about the town. I did know it was drier than Seattle."

Spokane had cultural amenities, he found, and he wouldn't have to commute more than 10 minutes to get to work each day.

Once here, Powell started his legal career at a then-long established firm named Graves, Kizer, Graves, which was located in what is today the U.S. Bank building. There, he worked with Ben Kizer, one of the attorneys he would look up to for years. Kizer demonstrated for Powell that as an attorney he shouldn't be afraid to "take on the establishment," Powell says.

Powell says that over the years, he's also learned a lot from some of the trial lawyers he's gone up against in court.

"You go into court and get beat up by one of them, you learn a few things," he says.

Still, he says, the professional camaraderie between lawyers here would be difficult to match in other areas of the work force. Lawyers, Powell says, have to work with each other to reach resolutions on behalf of clients.

While at Graves, Kizer, Graves, Powell handled his first-ever case in Spokane County Superior Court—and it ended up going all the way to the Washington state Supreme Court, he says.

Powell represented a mother who was battling an insurance company that had claimed her son had killed himself in his barracks overseas, and was denying life-insurance benefits on the basis that the death was a suicide. The mother, through Powell, argued during the trial that her son had died when he was showing off with a gun in front of some fellow Marines. Powell won the case, the insurance company appealed, and the case went on to the state's top court, where Powell again prevailed.

"I was pleased that we managed to win," he says.

Powell worked on a variety of cases while at that first law firm, and also was appointed by judges to represent criminal defendants, since there were no public defenders at the time. The judges wanted to give some of the younger attorneys some experience, he says. The attorneys chosen to handle the cases would earn $25 per day for their work.

In 1964, the firm dissolved. Powell then practiced for five years at Gaiser & Powell, a firm he co-founded, doing some business-law work and handling public utility cases, estate planning, and litigation, before going out on his own for four years. He spent eight years until 1981 in the partnership Powell & Harnetiaux, which he helped established, then became a lone practitioner again until 1985. It was then he helped form Powell & Morris PS, where he stayed until about 2001, before helping establish Powell, Kuznetz & Parker.

He says he's always handled a wide variety of cases, including a lot of personal-injury claims. Some lawyers begin to specialize, he says, but that never interested him. The variety of work he did included criminal law for about 20 years, he says.

During the Vietnam War, he represented a number of what he calls "draft resisters," who didn't want to take part in the war or for some reason couldn't. "There were a lot of interesting cases in that," he says.

Among them, he represented college students, those who wouldn't fight because of religious beliefs, and other singular cases such as a concert pianist, who he says never would have done the military any good anyway.

"People don't realize how close our society came to disintegrating during that time," Powell says. "The draft was behind a lot of that stuff."

Technology

The world of employment law, where he has done a great deal of work in his career, has been affected in interesting ways by the advent of the Internet, cell phones, and most recently, the emergence of text messaging, he says.

"It's radically changed communication, and speeded up communication," he says of the new modes of communication. But, he says, "e-mail leaves a paper trail."

That paper trail, Powell says, can provide the smoking gun needed to prove a case, particularly in an employment lawsuit that involves a lot of he-said-she-said.

Getting the e-mail records from a company can make all the difference one way or another in a case, he says, adding that e-mails aren't private, and a company has a right to read them.

Text messaging can have similar consequences in a lawsuit. He was involved in a case last year in which a teacher was accused of having a relationship that was too close with a student. Text messages were retrieved from a mobile phone company, making an impact in the case, he says. Powell hired a college student to translate the messages, which he says "were basically in another language" because of the abbreviations, symbols, and characters some people use to communicate via text messaging.

"It's a new world out there," he says.

Changes in Spokane

Spokane also has changed a lot since Powell arrived here in the late 1950s, he says. In his estimation, there are four or five times more lawyers here than there were then—and a handful of families don't run the city, as in earlier times, Powell says. The city isn't as divided demographically as it was then, when much of the wealthy class lived on the South Hill, while the working class lived on the North Side. The Police Department, though scrutinized publicly recently, isn't the "corrupt" fraternity it was then, he says.

Business also has changed a lot here, where large lumber mills, wood-products companies, and flour mills were the economic engines for the Spokane area, he says.

"Families in lumber, farming, and mining made their fortunes here in those areas, and are all pretty much gone," he says.

Powell was born and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, and attended Oregon State University and UCLA. His first wife died of cancer in 1975, and his second wife, Lucille, died in 1982. Today, Powell and his third wife, Leona, live in Spokane.

He has a daughter who operates a real estate investment company in Toronto, a son who is a real estate consultant in Seattle, and another son who works in food products distribution here. His hobbies include winemaking, home and car repairs, and, earlier in life, skiing, he says.

These days he likes to spend free time traveling and reading. He visited Italy in July, and has been to Argentina and Chile, as well as Cuba, the latter trip part of a National Geographic tour. Next, he'd like to visit South Africa and the Baltic.

Powell offers this advice to young people: "If you like what you're doing, you're going to be successful. If you don't like what you're doing you better go find another occupation. The worst thing that could happen would be being unhappy with your job."

He says being unhappy hurts not only an employee, but their employer, family, and friends.

"Being unhappy is going to affect everyone," he says. "Mostly I've been happy with what I've been doing."