Judge Laurel Siddoway retires from court of appeals after 13 years on the job

After 13 years as a Washington State Court of Appeals judge, Laurel Siddoway plans to retire at the end of the month.

Judge George Fearing, chief of the Division III Court of Appeals, teared up when talking about Siddoway’s retirement.

“She’s highly intelligent. She’s thorough. She’s a hard worker,” Fearing said. “I will miss her very much.”

Siddoway, 68, is “willing to listen to those who are not always listened to,” Fearing said.

Siddoway attended the University of Utah, where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy before attending law school and graduating in 1979. She and her husband spent years in New York, where Siddoway worked in the litigation department of Dean Witter Reynolds Inc.

When the couple’s first son was born, they moved to Spokane, where they had two more boys.

In Spokane, Siddoway had a lengthy career in business litigation. She served as the city’s chief council on River Park Square during a lengthy legal battle and controversy over the price of the parking garage.

River Park Square is owned by the Cowles Co., which also publishes The Spokesman-Review.

Siddoway was managing partner at Randall Danksin until she was appointed to the Court of Appeals Division III in May 2010.

She recalled applying for the position in hopes of finding an interesting new stage of her career. She was not disappointed.

“Something lands on your plate and you’re provided with a limited record, the things you have to see to decide the issues in the case. You’re kind of moving through things pretty quickly,” Siddoway said. “You see a lot of interesting cases and good lawyers.”

As someone with cases before the court prior to being a judge, Siddoway knows firsthand how important judicial opinions can be to the parties involved.

When Siddoway won a case in appeals court, she might skim the opinion “because I knew why I won.”

“It’s the party who loses that really wants to look and see if the court really understood their points and engaged on their points,” Siddoway said. “I do try to write the opinion in a way that will hopefully explain to the party who loses why they lost.”

Over the course of her time as a judge, Siddoway has written about 750 opinions and voted on hundreds more. Appeals court judges in Washington handle cases on three-judge panels.

The appellate court handles the majority of appeals in the state.

“It’s kind of like the U.S. Supreme Court, our supreme court only takes the cases they want to take, the issues they want to decide. For everyone else that wants to appeal, they have to start with us, and usually they end with us,” Siddoway said.

While the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in huge backlogs for many superior courts in the state, it led to a drop in caseload for the appeals court. To even out the caseload, Division III, located in Spokane, has taken cases from other divisions.

The pandemic pushed the court to set up virtual hearings, “which has been a really positive development,” Siddoway said.

Sometimes attorneys would decline to do oral arguments before the pandemic because traveling to Spokane would take up an entire day. Now those arguments, which Siddoway said judges appreciate, can take place via Zoom.

“Being able to offer the alternative of a Zoom argument means we have more attorneys wanting to do oral arguments,” Siddoway said.

The appeals court also began accepting direct review of final decisions from administrative agencies in June 2021, eliminating the requirement that the case first be filed in superior court and hopefully reducing those already-stacked dockets.

“That was one thing that we were able to do to try and help them out a little bit,” Siddoway said.

Siddoway is retiring at a time of high turnover for the court. Half of the current judges have been appointed since 2020.

That turnover has created some cultural shifts in courts that have operated the same way for decades, she said.

While Siddoway has loved her time on the appeals court, she’s ready to spend more time with her three sons and swap out the hundreds of pages of legal filings she reads each week for Cormac McCarthy’s last novel.

Siddoway will retire July 31. Spokane County Superior Court Judge John Cooney was appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee to fill her seat.