‘Girl Warrior’

Colleen Durkin Peterson remembers standing at the door behind her father as a young girl, trying to see who had rung the bell. Crowded onto the small porch were a couple with two children. They bore a gift: a small lawn statue of St. Francis of Assisi.

“‘We just want to thank you,’” Durkin Peterson recalls them saying to her father, John, an attorney who had repped them in a personal injury case. “‘We know you lost, but don’t be upset. It meant the world to us that you listened.’

“I remember seeing the contrast,” says Durkin Peterson. “My dad felt so bad, like he had failed these people and what could he have done better for them, and they show up and they’re so grateful that somebody just spent the time and listened and was willing to fight for them.

“We all want to do well for our clients, but just giving a voice to people matters, and that’s why I ended up becoming a plaintiff’s attorney.”

Durkin Peterson, a partner at Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala in Tacoma and the 2023-’24 president of the Washington State Association for Justice (WSAJ), is deeply concerned about achieving justice for the underserved. It’s a passion that has motivated a great deal of volunteer work, including serving on the board of Gonzaga University School of Law’s Center for Civil and Human Rights from 2018-’22 and on the WSAJ’s Diversity Committee from 2020-’23. Promoting diversity and inclusion—through programs ranging from recruiting at colleges to sending lawyers to speak to high school students about the civil justice system—has also been a prime goal for her as WSAJ’s president. “As an Asian-Irish woman, it has always been important to me that people see, ‘I can do this, too,’” she says.

Her father was an Eagle member of the organization from 1986 until his retirement in 2020.

“To have that example of commitment to justice reinforced from such a young age,” says Durkin Peterson, “I’m just so thankful and grateful.”

In college, she had a near-detour in her career when she considered becoming a sports agent to protect the interests of two of her brother’s friends who were NBA prospects and, as she saw it, about to enter a lion’s den. But she decided becoming an attorney was the better course. “If my little brother’s friends ever need help, I’m here for them,” she says.

When she was young, her dad let her hang out often in his law office and observe him in court—though he might not have had much choice. “I wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Durkin Peterson admits. “Maybe that was already a little lawyer trait.”

Two years out of law school, Durkin Peterson realized she loved practicing medical malpractice law and made that her focus. When she joined her current personal injury firm in February 2022, she remembers being told, “We have a case that we think you may like. It’s got some medicine in it.”

The case was a big suit against Monsanto over the leakage of PCBs from light fixtures at Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe. Brought in 2018, it has resulted in multimillion-dollar verdicts on behalf of the students, teachers and staff who suffered injuries including brain damage. Durkin Peterson has helped win two of these cases, with more to come this fall and winter. 

“It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever done before,” she says. Durkin Peterson’s focus is the health injuries of the people who breathed in the toxin. She works with occupational and environmental physicians, neurosurgeons and neuroradiologists to learn more so she can distill the complex issues to present to the jury. “I really enjoy it, it’s very challenging, it highlights one of my favorite parts of my job—which is always learning, and learning from the best in the nation.”

Durkin Peterson is the only one of five siblings to follow in their father’s footsteps—but the desire was immediate for her. Even as a kindergartener, she was eager to inform people that she would grow up to be a girl “warrior,” the word she mistakenly used for “lawyer.”

“We never corrected her,” her father said during a toast at her 2011 wedding to Mike Peterson, a teacher at Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma. “Because it is one and the same. A girl lawyer is a girl warrior, and that title served her just fine over the years.”

Words of Wisdom

• A few guiding principles of John Durkin’s that have informed his daughter’s career:
• Ask yourself what you’ve done today to move the ball for your client.
• Get to know your client. Truly learn what these people have lost.
• Tell the truth, no matter what.