By Diana Brement , JTNews Correspondent
Name: Wendy Goffe
City: Seattle
Age: 46
Occupation: Attorney
What’s on her mind these days: “The possibility of gay marriage.”
You can often find attorney Wendy Goffe jetting around the country, speaking about her work with unmarried couples.
Goffe hasn’t had any trouble keeping her career in an upward trajectory as an estate attorney with the firm Graham & Dunn who works with high-net-worth individuals and an expert in charitable giving and family business succession plans.
A 1992 graduate of the University of Washington law school (where she was also an undergrad), she was designated a “rising star” by Washington Law & Politics in 2001, and a “super lawyer” in the years since. The publication Best Lawyers singled her out as one of the best lawyers in the country in 2009.
“She has a real passion for the law” and is a “great speaker” says Seattle attorney David Stiefel. “She is a true professional. She is a pleasure to work with [and]…loves dealing with clients and complicated issues.”
Along the way, Goffe has developed an interesting sub-specialty. She’s become an expert in legal issues faced by same-sex couples and unmarried couples trying to craft documents that give them the same rights automatically accorded to married people “to the extent possible,” she says. “And if not possible, I’ve been working on legislation.”
Goffe gives talks around the country about the legal implications of changing laws on same-gender partnerships. In Washington she helped draft the Domestic Partnership Bill, and its two rewrites. The state legislature passed the first law in 2007, and the “everything but marriage” bill in 2009. An initiative to repeal the law failed later in the year.
“Over time I’ve gotten to know and been fortunate to work with non-traditional family structures and seen firsthand the challenges that people face caused by legislation and societal attitudes, and the barriers they face having to take care of themselves and predictably raise a family,” Wendy says.
Wendy says the “challenges…[and] unfortunate situations,” she’s seen have driven her to make a difference.
The dot-com boom and Goffe’s early career made a fortunate collision. A lot of people in the Seattle area were getting jobs at Microsoft and “getting to the point where they needed more advance planning. I was at the point in my career when I could do it…I got involved with a lot of unmarried and same-gender couples.”
Wendy often travels to small towns and even fundamentalist churches to speak on the subject.
“I just came back from giving a talk in South Dakota on gay marriage” where folks feel they are “in a fishbowl, looking out, wondering what is happening out there [in the world],” she says. (It was also the start of hunting season and Goffe says she was among a small minority of people in the airport not carrying a rifle.)
She can make these speeches “because I’m married and I’m Jewish, and there are a lot of places…that want to know about this, but not from a zealot,” she says. “I’m pretty safe.” She did once receive “hate mail” from Jerry Falwell, Jr., which she jokes was the “highlight of my career.” Falwell included a DVD about a Jewish man who became a Christian.
Growing up at Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Goffe, her husband, Scott Schrum, and their daughter Maya are currently unaffiliated. In recent years she has felt “the most Jewish” while in Houston where Scott has had a number of treatments for pancreatic cancer and the local Jewish Family Services reaches out to patients and families. For now, Goffe says, “Gilda’s Club is our congregation.”
Goffe finds fun in her work, a lot of which she does on her own, “and it’s kind of meditative.” She loves the travel, and “I always make time to go to a museum if there is one.” Even in Sioux Falls she discovered the Museum of Visual Materials in a completely “green” building, featuring the founder’s “collection of 80,000 buttons.”