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Matt Mills: Ready for a turn in his legal path

Matt Mills is ready for his path to take a turn.

A deputy prosecutor in Kittitas County Superior Court, Mills is now one of three local attorneys running to replace Superior Court Judge L. Candace Hooper.

Hooper, the current judge in the Superior Court Judge, Department 1 position, decided against seeking another term and has announced plans to retire.

Before changing careers and attending night school at Seattle University’s School of Law where he earned his Doctor of Jurisprudence, Mills worked for 10 years in the biotechnology industry.

Mills graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in biochemistry in 1997. He met his wife there, and after she graduated in 2000 with a degree in engineering mechanics, they came to Washington.

“She actually had competing offers from Boeing and the Navy. But the Navy hired her to go work at the shipyard in Bremerton,” Mills added, where she worked on submarines.

He was employed at ZymoGenetics, a biotech/pharmaceutical firm in Seattle for about eight years, taking the ferry over from Bremerton.

When children entered their family picture, their journey took a turn.

“When we had our first kid, we decided I should probably go back to school; make some more money,” he said.

He had just turned 30. Mills continued with his day job while attending the Seattle University law program at night. He graduated in 2008.

“Thought I’d go into patent law; passed the patent bar. But then I ended up working for a lawyer in Silverdale who was a general practitioner. I decided I liked the courtroom stuff so I stuck with that,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time Mills had decided to start anew and blaze a new trail.

He grew up in Wisconsin, in Cleveland, a little village with a bank and a grocery store, about halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay. The high school was in nearby Sheboygan.

His father had been a veterinarian, mostly for dairy farmers, and Mills once thought he’d do that too, someday.

“My dad’s activity was so romantic,” he recalled, going to each farm, knowing every family. “I rode around with him in the summers. My first job was kind of his de facto assistant.”

“For a long time I thought I’d take over my dad’s business. Toward the end of the ’90s, I kind of saw that family farms were starting to go away,” he said.

“Law really never crossed my mind until I found the Seattle U program,” Mills added.

Read more here: https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/election/matt-mills-ready-for-a-turn-in-his-legal-path-2024-primary-election/article_b7d2c11e-5112-11ef-a3b3-435ffce59719.html