Colleen Durkin Peterson

Colleen Durkin Peterson believes that the practice of law is, at its heart, an act of compassion. She represents patients harmed by medical negligence, vulnerable adults neglected in nursing homes, and families whose lives have been upended by toxic exposure  — and she does it with the conviction that every client deserves to be seen, heard, and honored as a whole human being.

For most of Colleen’s clients, the harm they’ve suffered is permanent. Paralysis. Brain injury. A delivery gone wrong. A stroke missed or mistreated. A diagnosis that came too late. Death. Behind every one of these injuries is a family relearning how to live without — how to walk, how to speak, how to trust the systems that were supposed to protect them. Colleen cannot undo that harm. What she can do is walk beside her clients, fight for them with everything she has, and make sure the people and institutions responsible answer for what they’ve taken.

Get to know your client. Sit with them in their living room. Meet their family, their friends, the people who love them — because you cannot fight for someone’s loss until you understand the full shape of it. That was her father’s advice when she was a girl watching him and her uncle practice law, and it remains the foundation of how she practices today. To Colleen, this work has never been something you can do well from behind a desk. It requires showing up — in hospital rooms, in living rooms, in the quiet, hard conversations where a family’s real story finally comes out.

That belief in showing up is what servant leadership looks like in a courtroom. Colleen doesn’t practice law apart from her clients, directing their case from a distance — she stands with them, carrying weight they should never have had to carry alone. She listens first. She learns the medicine, the science, the details of what went wrong, not because she has to, but because her clients deserve an advocate who understands their injury as intimately as those who caused it. And she stays close through every step, keeping her clients informed and empowered to make their own decisions, because true advocacy means giving people back a measure of the control that was taken from them.

None of this compassion makes Colleen any less fierce. She is a relentless, aggressive advocate who has spent her career mastering complex medical science and compelling insurance companies and defendants to reckon with the true value of what their negligence destroyed. In the courtroom, she is skilled and formidable, earning some of the biggest verdicts in the country, and has resolved countless complex medical malpractice and nursing home cases in mediation, often securing results that exceed what her clients believed possible. Compassion and tenacity are not opposites in Colleen’s practice — they are the same instinct, aimed in two directions at once: toward her clients with tenderness, and toward the entities who harmed them with unflinching resolve.

At its core, Colleen’s work is guided by a simple, stubborn belief — in justice, for the people whose lives have been shattered by someone else’s negligence, and for the communities she believes are made stronger every time the truth is finally told. She takes that belief into every deposition, every mediation, and every courtroom, because she has never forgotten what her father taught her: this work isn’t about a file number. It’s about a person, a family, our communities, and a loss worth fighting for.

• Washington State Association for Justice (WSAJ), Past President (2023-2024)
• WSAJ, Board Member
• WSAJ Amicus Foundation, Board Member
• WSAJ Justice for All PAC, Board Member
• Washington Pattern Instruction Committee (WPI), Member
• Damages Attorney Roundtable (DART)
• American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA)
• American Association for Justice (AAJ)
• Foundation for Washington State Courts (FWSC), Board Member
• Gonzaga Law School Board
• King County Bar Association
• Pierce County Bar Association
• Federal Bar Association

• $100 million verdict against chemical conglomerate Monsanto (now known as Pharmacia LLC) on behalf of 12 previous students and 3 adults frequently exposed to PCBs at Sky Valley Education Center.
• $165 million verdict against chemical conglomerate Monsanto spinoff company Pharmacia LLC on behalf of a group of former Sky Valley Education Center employees.
• $72 million verdict in PCB exposure case against Monsanto on behalf of two clients exposed to PCBs at Sky Valley Education Center.
• $4 million verdict against University of Washington Medical Center for failure to recognize and timely treat wound infection