Meet Laura

Laura grew up in Wenatchee, where she was high school Valedictorian, then represented the United States as a Rotary Exchange Student assigned to Venezuela — where she engaged the culture, learned the language, and came to appreciate on a tangible level the freedoms we have in our country. When she returned after a school year abroad, she studied at Seattle Pacific University, earning her Bachelor of Arts in Communication, graduating summa cum laude, working at Ken’s Market on Queen Anne to pay for expenses not covered by scholarships. She has worked in some capacity since she was eleven years old, starting with babysitting and food service.

“Whenever I travel, I make a point of learning at least one phrase that will prompt a native speaker to respond to me in their own tongue.” Laura's year in Venezuela planted the seed of a lifelong love of languages. Her Spanish is solid; she studied German and Russian in college, and Latin and French (from Spanish) while abroad.

After SPU, Laura was accepted to the University of Washington School of Law, earning her Juris Doctor and being admitted to the Washington State Bar in 1996.

“I don’t know of anyone who dreams of becoming a divorce lawyer.” Fresh out of law school, Laura needed work, and the first position offered was with a small firm close to home. Michael W. Bugni and his firm gave her a chance — and she did not expect to find real satisfaction in giving people a voice they could not otherwise express for themselves.

When asked to explain, she recalls: “There were several moments when my clients would read a Declaration I drafted after listening to their story and exclaim, ‘How did you know?’ Regardless of the outcome, they felt heard, that their life experience had been told and considered.” These moments of affirmation encouraged her to apply her skillset and growing expertise to serve clients in the midst of life crisis, helping to navigate and distill the chaos of family law conflict into a path of clarity and order.

Family Law is not a narrow specialty. It touches property rights, taxes, small businesses, investments, criminal law, mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence, among other areas of law. The lens is wide. As one of the first to complete Rigos Bar Review (and pass the Bar), she was enlisted as a lecturer in 1997 to teach Family Law and Community Property for the then-all-essay Bar Exam. She filled this role for 16 years, until the WSBA adopted the Multi-State component in 2013. Her real-life examples helped the next wave of attorneys catch a glimpse of the complexity in this area of practice.

After years as a Family Law attorney, Laura found herself frustrated at times with court decisions that did not go the way she had hoped. So she decided to do something about it. In 2008, after eleven years in practice, she was accepted as a Court Commissioner pro tem for Snohomish County Superior Court. She accepted assignments for the Family Law Motions calendar, the area of law she knew best.

She was immediately humbled at the scope of the workload involved — twice over. First, by the sheer volume of reading required: these are hard-working public servants who log many uncounted hours. Second, by the fundamental difficulty of the work: most family disputes involve situations that are purely he-said/she-said, occurring in the privacy of the home, with no witnesses, limited corroborating evidence, and other factors unique to each family’s experience and history.

Her approach: read everything, understand the procedural context, follow the evidence to what “more likely than not” actually happened, then apply the law. Have her decisions been reviewed and revised? Yes, occasionally. And that’s exactly how the system is designed to work.

In 2015, she was approved as a court-appointed Arbitrator, conducting hearings and making decisions in mostly child-support cases under Mandatory Arbitration Rules.

No one judge or panel of judges or Justice on the bench gets it right all the time. She has come to appreciate that it is sometimes impossible to know with certainty “what happened” behind closed doors. She was not there to observe. She must rely on other reporters and exercise her best judgment.

Laura is a person of faith. Washington’s Constitution was written “in gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe” — an acknowledgment, baked into the document itself, that human institutions are limited, requiring a measure of humility. No person is valued above or below another. Every litigant is entitled to due process, to be heard, to a tribunal that listens to both sides before deciding who is right or wrong.

She believes in God and does her best to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in her personal life. But what that means on the bench is not ideology — it’s the same thing Solomon asked for: wisdom. The willingness to sit with complexity, to resist the easy answer, to hear the second person before deciding the first one was right, or wrong.

Laura has been married to Jason Colberg for thirty years. They live in Lake Forest Park, WA, and have two adult sons, a daughter-in-law, one granddaughter, and one more on the way.

She and Jason play a daily game of Cribbage and mark the calendar to document the win. She is a committed fan of Survivor. She has co-opted an award-winning chocolate chip cookie recipe that, she insists, never fails. She loves a good road trip, soft-serve vanilla on a sugar cone, an ooey-gooey cinnamon roll, See’s Bridge Mix, and handwritten, postage-stamped letters from people near and dear to her.

Her favorite reads include Watership Down, All the Light We Cannot See, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Help. She collects playing cards when she travels. She still finds it remarkable that airplanes work — but she trusts them, and delights in where they take her.