Born and raised in Spokane County, Colleen grew up in a family of public servants. Her father was a public school educator, and her mother was a nurse who worked at the Department of Health on improving our health care system.

In college at the University of Washington, Colleen waited tables full-time while earning double degrees in Law, Societies, and Justice and in Spanish. She volunteered throughout college at the Casa Latina Day Workers’ Center, helping immigrant workers find employment opportunities, access essential services, and safely integrate into our communities.

Colleen returned to the University of Washington for law school, where she was an inaugural recipient of the Gates Public Service Law Scholarship, a highly competitive scholarship for students dedicated to public-interest law. She interned at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, helping LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing violence and torture from countries where it is illegal to be gay. She also interned as a public defender serving indigent adults and children in King County. 

After law school, Colleen dedicated her career to protecting and defending civil rights. She worked at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, DC from 2010-2014, enforcing our nation’s bedrock civil rights laws in courtrooms across the country. Then in 2015, she returned home to Washington to serve as the first Chief of the Civil Rights Division in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, where she developed a team of lawyers, investigators, and skilled professional staff that became a national model of civil rights enforcement. 

In that role, she took on Fortune 100 companies for unfair business practices, took the federal government to court dozens of times for violating the rights of Washingtonians, beat the NW Detention Center at trial and stopped its abusive practice of paying detained workers just $1/day to run that facility, stood up for pregnant workers whose rights were flouted by their employers, and defended farmworkers who were subjected to wage theft and harassment.

For years, Colleen has volunteered through the statewide Access to Justice Board to advance rules that improve court access, and through the King County Bar Foundation to support pro bono legal service programs and minority law student scholarships. 

As a Supreme Court Justice, Colleen is already making an impact– working to ensure that courts are safe and accessible to all, and advocating for the use of technology to improve court access, particularly in Eastern Washington. She regularly speaks to civic and community groups about the importance of state courts and state constitutions in safeguarding our democracy.  

Colleen is the proud mother of two daughters who attend public school. She lives with her husband and children in rural King County.