Ken Friedman Earns Washington ABOTA’s Lifetime Achievement Award
The honor recognizes decades of service to Washington’s bench and bar. The evening’s remarks dwelt on something harder to measure.
A trial lawyer’s career is usually told in verdicts. When the Washington Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates gathered for its Annual Awards Dinner on November 5, 2026, at The Rainier Club in Seattle, the account of Ken Friedman‘s career ran along other lines: humility, kindness, and a word that opposing counsel could rely on.
Friedman, a partner at Friedman | Rubin, received the chapter’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given to a long-time ABOTA member in recognition and appreciation of years of dedicated service to the bench and bar of Washington. It is the highest honor the chapter confers on one of its own members. ABOTA itself, founded in 1958, is a national association of experienced trial lawyers and judges devoted to preserving the right to a civil jury trial.
A graduate of New York University School of Law, Friedman has been a member of the Washington bar since 1987 and a partner at Friedman | Rubin since 1999. Over those years he has represented people in personal injury, insurance, and employment cases against some of the largest institutions in the country.
“He leads with humility”
The award was presented by attorney Colleen Durkin Peterson, Friedman’s law partner, who made a point of setting the résumé, and his multiple 7, 8 and 9 figure verdicts, aside.
“His accomplishments speak for themselves,” Peterson told the room. “But the reason we celebrate Ken tonight is not just because of his verdicts. It is because of who he is.”
What followed was a portrait of a lawyer who has declined the profession’s usual bargains. “In a profession that often rewards ego, Ken leads with humility. In a profession that can sometimes become hard, he remains kind. In a profession where character is tested every day, he never compromises his integrity.”
The evidence offered was the kind that accumulates only over decades: colleagues who trust him, judges who respect him, opposing counsel who know his word means something. “Those of us fortunate enough to work alongside him,” Peterson said, “know that he makes all of us better lawyers and better people.”
The highest praise was reserved for life outside the courtroom. “Despite all of his success, his greatest achievement is not his career. It is his family. His love for Jane, his children, and his grandchildren is evident in everything he does.”
The privilege, and the price
Friedman’s own remarks picked up that thread. He spoke of trial work as a privilege: the rare job in which a person in the worst season of their life hands you their story and trusts you to tell it to twelve strangers.
He was equally candid about what that privilege costs. Trials take over evenings, weekends, and school recitals, and the sacrifice is borne by families as much as by the lawyers themselves. Balance matters, he told the room, and the sacrifice should run in both directions. It is all right to give something up for your family, too.
He closed on the mission that gives ABOTA its reason for being. The right to trial by jury, which Washington’s constitution declares “shall remain inviolate,” survives only as long as people are willing to defend it. Friedman called on everyone in the room to stand up against efforts to take that right away.
An example worth following
For those of us at Friedman | Rubin, the award confirms what daily proximity has long made plain. As Peterson put it in closing: “You have shown that it is possible to be a great trial lawyer without losing your humanity, to be competitive without losing your kindness, and to succeed without forgetting to lift others up along the way.”
Congratulations, Ken. No one is more deserving of this honor.
