Arthur Severance

Arthur is a seasoned personal injury and wrongful death litigator, with more than 18 years of experience appearing before state and federal courts, both at the trial and appellate levels, as well as administrative agencies.

Arthur is particularly experienced in handling recreational boating accident litigation. He is a Proctor Member of the Maritime Law Association of the United States and is certified as a specialist in Admiralty and Maritime law by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California. He served on California’s Admiralty and Maritime Law Advisory Commission for 8 years and was its chair for two of those years.  

Arthur is licensed to practice law in Alaska, Arizona, California, and Colorado. He is admitted to practice before all state and federal courts in those states, as well as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and Tenth Circuits and the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Before becoming a litigator, Arthur served in the U.S. Navy on board the guided missile frigate USS Taylor, FFG-50, where he repaired all manner of electronics, especially radios and radio equipment. He also inspected the ship’s training programs and designed and conducted emergency response training scenarios. He was deployed twice, once to the Persian Gulf as part of the U.N. embargo of Iraqi oil following the first Gulf War and again to the Mediterranean Seas part of a NATO task force during Operation Enduring Freedom. He was awarded three Navy Achievement Medals during his service – one for leading the combat electronics division, another for his work maintaining the vessel’s communications gear, and a third for finding evidence of embargo violations during the seizure of the Russian-flagged M/T Volga-Neft 147 on the vessel’s desktop computers. Arthur has two service-connected disabilities – tinnitus and some hearing loss – stemming from his time at sea.  

The law is actually Arthur’s third career. While on study abroad in Vienna as a German, history, and political science major in 1989 in preparation to become an historian researching the development of consociational democracy in Austria, the Iron Curtain fell. He decided to return to Austria and Germany after graduation to experience history in the making, rather than read about it in a library. Initially, he was a Fulbright English teaching assistant at two Austrian high schools near Vienna. He then moved to East Berlin and worked for five years teaching English as a foreign language to East German, Russian, Vietnamese, and Hungarian doctors and nurses, airline and hotel staff, retail clerks, and senior citizens in various government training programs and language schools.  

Arthur has been an avid judge of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) all the while, for over 45 years now. He has run games at countless gaming conventions and game days in Southern California and other parts of the United States. For two years he volunteered as the regional organized play coordinator for the western United States for the largest TTRPG publisher, drafting and editing many of the program’s documents. These days, when he is not working on his cases, he can be found in Tempe, Arizona, planning the next session of his weekly home game (which has defied all odds by continuing for 17 years!), exploring his newly adopted state with his stump-tailed Australian cattle dog, Sterling, or indulging in his lifelong love of learning by taking night classes at a local college in topics ranging from accounting and insurance to education, history, and Central Alaskan Yup’ik.