Douglas Ross Shepherd

I was born and raised on the prairie of Montana. My immediate family included four very active brothers, one of which is my identical twin. I graduated from Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. The United States Navy brought me to Whidbey Island, Washington, to fly the A-6 Intruder during the Vietnam War. When I first crossed over the Deception Pass Bridge, I immediately fell in love with the area and never left.

After leaving the Navy, thankful for the G.I Bill and its commitment to education, I attended the University Of Puget Sound Law School (now Seattle University Law School). Immediately after graduating from law school in 1979, with honors, I opened my law firm in Whatcom County, Washington.

My interests include family, reading, skiing, and baseball. I am blessed with a remarkable wife, a beautiful daughter, an amazing son-in-law, and three perfect grandchildren. My grandchildren accept all of my flaws and appear to believe I am faultless; unfortunately, this very small minority is not likely to last.

I am also blessed to work with extraordinary people who care deeply about justice, what we do, and the legal issues our clients ask us to resolve for them. On a daily basis we get to write, speak and argue about justice, what a gift. We are able to participate in great conversations about profoundly important individual and community issues, while being challenged daily by the following words of a philosopher whom I first read in college:

“Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every person who has speech. . . . An awful privilege, and awful responsibility that we should help create the world in which posterity will live.”– William Clark Clifford THE ETHICS OF BELIEF