Jeremiah M. Long

Jeremiah M. LONG Jeremiah Michael Long. Beloved husband of Marilyn (Ruple) passed away Wednesday, March 7. Jerry was a nationally respected lawyer and family man. Born in Cambridge, MA in 1929, he was the son of the late Michael and Mary Norah (Joyce) Long. Jerry was a graduate of Boston College High School; he attended Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and received his law degree from Boston College. He was a member of the Massachusetts and Washington State bars and the bar of the District of Columbia. Following graduation from law school, he was drafted into the US Army and advanced to 1st Lieutenant in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps and served in the Pentagon during the Korean War. He was the founder and President of the Bellevue, WA firm of Section 1031 Services, Inc. Jerry was the first of five children born to unskilled Irish Catholic immigrants who, like so many others, were devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Growing up in Dorchester, Jerry and his brothers, Frank and Jack shared the same bed until Michael, the last of the four children, arrived in 1939 and they had outgrown their home in Dorchester. That year their father bought a fixer-upper in Squantum, MA, now Mary's home, and the place they all still consider the Homestead. Jerry was the big brother to all of his younger siblings from the beginning and to the end. Jerry was an excellent student and a hard worker. Jerry worked at various jobs while growing up ranging from neighborhood paper routes to restaurant work in Cambridge to a bank teller in Boston. Jerry readily accepted challenges. He really went where no one else in the family or his circle of friends had been before. Its as if he knew, in the long run, where he wanted to go and he was wiling to work hard to get there and get there on time. A perfect example of this is the decision he made to establish himself in Seattle, WA following discharge from the Army. While he had a childhood fascination with Alaska, he hadn't ever been further west in the country than Washington, DC. Nevertheless, he packed up and moved bag and baggage to a place he'd never seen before. He set about establishing the requisite six month residency for taking the Washington State bar exam. He set up the goal of passing that bar exam on the first try and he studied Washington State law (something he had no previous familiarity with) for those six months. He accomplished his goal; he passed the bar on his first try just as he had the Massachusetts bar exam four years earlier. Jerry did not necessarily make friends easily, but a friend of Jerry's was a friend for life in most cases. Back in the mid-1960s Jerry Long had a reputation as he was well-known in the legal community as an excellent condemnation litigator and as a writer on issues important to condemnation lawyers involving discovery matters and evidence matters. His reputation as one of the finest condemnation litigators in the State was well-deserved and widely known. Jerry was then an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle and the interstate freeway system was in the middle stages of land acquisition and construction in Western Washington. In order to acquire parcels quickly using the expedited federal eminent domain procedures, the U.S. Attorneys Office was enlisted to aid the State in acquiring right-of-way for Interstate 5, 405, 90 and connecting highways. Jerry was instrumental in handling highway condemnation cases for the state while he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney, as well as handling federal acquisitions. During this time he participated in seminars on discovery and evidence in condemnation proceedings and wrote articles on discovery and condemnation proceedings. In 1965, Discovery and Experts under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was published by Jerry in the Washington Law Review. Shortly after publication West Publishing Company, asked permission, which was granted, to reprint the article in Federal Rules Decisions. The article was cited many times but most significantly was among a very few articles cited by the Advisory Committee on the Rules in support of revisions to Section 26(b). During the late 60's after his stint as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, he was a partner in the downtown law firm of Long, Mikkelborg, Wells & Fryer. The firm had just recently dropped the lead name of Broz when Dick Broz went on the Superior Court Bench by a gubernatorial appointment. Jerry was a brilliant lawyer, but had the special ability to also be an excellent student and teacher of the law. Jerry was a mentor to many. One of his favorite sayings after reviewing written materials of his students of the law was "If I had more time I could have made it shorter." Never was he derogatory, but he was always willing to guide. Jerry was innovative in his approach to litigation and to the analysis of cases he took on. Jerry was also a lawyer's lawyer in the truest sense of the word. Jerry's law firm in the 1960s and 1970s represented the Washington State Bar Association in matters as general counsel and disciplinary counsel. Jerry, along with others, was active in this representation. Jerry received many condemnation and other land use referrals from other lawyers and from those actively involved in the real estate industry. Jerry was responsible for formation of the first Real Estate Investment Trust in the Seattle area working with a client. The novelty of the task was never an impediment to Jerry. Jerry thrived on tackling problems and coming up with creative solutions in the law. In the late 1970s Jerry left the law firm and established his own independent escrow practice in downtown Seattle. Not content to be just another escrow office, in an era of extraordinarily high interest rates Jerry was at the forefront in resisting the efforts by lenders to assert default against borrowers who attempted to sell residential real estate without paying off the low interest mortgage. Jerry was a pioneer in litigation involving the attempted enforcement of the due-on-sale clause by lenders in the State of Washington. Through various court battles and decisions, Jerry established the principle that due-on-sale clauses were an unreasonable restraint on alienation of property and therefore unenforceable, thereby enabling many sellers of homes to retain their homes and sell them, rather than lose them to lenders in foreclosure. This was just another example of Jerry's ingenuity and willingness to tackle novel but important legal challenges with intellect and tenacity. Jerry then tired of the escrow business as interest rates dropped and sought out a new challenge which he found in the area of tax-free exchanges. As a facilitator under IRC 1031 exchange transactions, Jerry became a pioneer in the area for the creative and competent handling of these extremely complex and sensitive transactions. Ultimately Jerry's clients in the exchange facilitator business included major international corporations exchanging assets ranging from millions of acres of forest land to millions of miles of wire and electronic equipment to automobiles and almost any other type of real or personal property held for trade or investment imaginable. Jerry's clients read like a Fortune 500 index. Jerry will also be remembered as a wonderful employer, giving his employees the window offices while he had an inside office, and encouraging them to further their education or pursue their other dreams. Not satisfied simply with engaging in the tax-free exchange business, Jerry wrote the seminal work on the subject in the form of a regularly updated, loose leaf bound volume on 1031 exchanges. Jerry's treatise on the exchange subject remains today the go-to resource and the Bible for those in the industry including lawyers, accountants, and corporate managers. Jerry's long-time business associate and