Bar Number: 50898
Brandon Isleib is the Seattle Code Reviser, housed in the Seattle City Attorney’s Office. Under the name Restless Mosaic, he’s produced an album for a Grammy-nominated rapper and is producing an EP for a Billboard chart-topping trance singer.
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What is the most interesting case you have handled in your career so far and why?
I had to interpret an intersection of the RCW and Seattle Charter that had been waiting 95 years to produce the exact right fact pattern, and no other municipalities had laws that could create a comparable situation. Two separate outside counsel opinions from experts agreed with different halves of my interpretation (which means they disagreed with each other). Knowing you’re in a novel legal situation is a feeling unlike any other.
Did you end up practicing in the area of law you expected? If not, where did you end up and why?
It’s the area of law I eventually wanted to practice, but coming out of law school I didn’t know it even existed. Graduating in 2009, I took what came to me, and that was document review for antitrust class actions. When that started to dry up, I Googled “Seattle legal publishing,” hoping to use my columnist experience for a magazine similar to the one you’re reading right now. It turned up zero magazines, but it did turn up Code Publishing, which was between legal reviewers and happy to let me try my hand at it. I’d get entire municipal codes during recodification projects and read them start to finish for legal issues, eventually advising jurisdictions in 12 states. Fourteen years later, I haven’t fixed all the laws, but it isn’t for a lack of trying.
What is your biggest success?
On paper, and as an icebreaker, it’s writing the ordinance that gave me my current legal powers as Code Reviser. (By pure coincidence, it took effect on my birthday.) But the real success is whenever people choose to involve me in what they’re working on. Everybody in life has a choice to route what they care about throughyou or around you, so whenever it’s the former, I’m supremely grateful.
What is an example of something you’ve done to make the legal field more accessible to legal professionals from marginalized backgrounds?
I’m autistic and don’t come from a lawyer family, and I still feel like an outsider in the culture. In 2020, Seattle had an extern who came from a few backgrounds that aren’t usual to the legal profession, and she also had no lawyers in her family. So I became one of her sounding boards to sort out all the scraps of career advice you get in law school and how to feel capable in the profession when you don’t have that confidence handed down to you. A few years later, she was trying to connect more broadly to the legal profession, so I suggested that she fill out this exact questionnaire. And you published Shaunita Felder’s profile in October 2023!
How would you be earning a living if you weren’t a lawyer?
I worked for Wizards of the Coast on Magic: The Gathering Online before taking my current job. I absolutely could have stuck with getting paid to play video games.
LIGHTNING ROUND
If you had to give a 10-minute presentation on one topic other than the law, what would it be and why Songwriting and music production, since that’s the other side of my endeavors these days. How much could I fit into 10 minutes? Great question.
What is one thing from your childhood that you would bring back if you could? Musicmatch Jukebox, pre-iTunes software with CD-ROMs that had tons of free music on them. I appear to be the world’s only collector of it, and I use my Reddit account to help people find songs they remember from it. I helped someone find a song they’d been trying to track down for 20 years; that was fun. Honorable mention to Oatmeal Swirlers.
What is the most unusual job you’ve ever had? I worked two summers in college for one of the nation’s biggest mail-order clock parts companies, because it happened to be on the road I lived on.
What’s your go-to karaoke song? “Justified and Ancient” by The KLF, feat. Tammy Wynette and Ricardo da Force, doing all three parts. The karaoke version doesn’t put the rap lyrics on the screen, so I had to memorize it.
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