Michael T. Pfau

Survivor Litigation

Pfau has practiced for more than three decades. His survivor matters have concluded through jury verdicts, negotiated settlements, and distributions in diocesan bankruptcies, including cases involving a YMCA and a church.

Claims may share a school, church, agency, policy, or period, but proof of access, organizational notice, corroboration, injury, and damages remains specific to each survivor. Pfau's practice honors that specificity: each client's case is built as its own case.

Individual preparation may include records identifying access, testimony about organizational notice, corroborating evidence, expert analysis concerning harm, and a damages record that can be presented at trial or evaluated in settlement.

Pfau's practice also emphasizes each client's control over privacy, testimony, disclosure, and settlement decisions when claims proceed through coordinated litigation, bankruptcy, or another collective process. That counseling function continues when collective deadlines or proposed allocations create pressure for a rapid choice — moments when a survivor most needs a lawyer committed to the client's own judgment.

J.S. v. Village Voice Media Holdings

Pfau represented three survivors who alleged that, while they were minors, pimps used advertisements on Backpage to sell them for sexual exploitation. Before the Washington Supreme Court, he defeated Backpage's categorical Section 230 dismissal theory.

The complaint connected Backpage's posting rules, content requirements, and design choices to the challenged advertisements. Those allegations gave the court a basis to distinguish passive publication from the platform's own alleged contribution to the content.

The court held that the pleaded platform conduct fell outside a categorical immunity argument and required examination of whether the service materially contributed to unlawful content.

The 2015 decision preserved the survivors' claims beyond the pleading stage and established a Washington rule for evaluating alleged platform contribution rather than treating every posting function as passive hosting — a landmark in the era before federal law caught up to online trafficking, won for clients whose claims most courts had been dismissing at the threshold.

Seattle Archdiocese Records

In May 2024, Washington's attorney general announced an investigation into the Catholic Church's handling of sexual-abuse allegations and sought to enforce a subpoena against the Archdiocese of Seattle after the state said the archdiocese declined voluntary cooperation.

Pfau publicly welcomed the investigation. His firm has pursued Washington church-abuse cases since 2002 and has represented more than 350 survivors. He argued that government access to church records could clarify how allegations were received, investigated, assigned, and disclosed.

He identified personnel files, assignment records, internal correspondence, prior complaints, and response decisions as evidence that can establish what church officials knew, when they received information, and how they acted.

Church-record work may require identifying the custodian, legal authority, discovery vehicle, privacy protections, and forum for each request. Pfau's civil practice has pursued organizational evidence through individual discovery, coordinated proceedings, bankruptcy claims, and public transparency advocacy — two decades of pressure that helped make church records a subject of public accountability in Washington.

Those records can connect an individual survivor's account to notice, assignments, internal response, and the decisions of responsible officials while preserving the evidence required for an individual claim.

Rekhter v. Department of Social and Health Services

Pfau represented the respondents in a Washington contract dispute involving home-care providers. A jury awarded approximately $57.1 million, and the judgment included roughly $38.7 million in prejudgment interest before the case reached the Washington Supreme Court.

The litigation involved a large group of home-care providers, extensive state-program records, and questions of authority and compensation. Pfau helped obtain the jury result and defended the judgment through appellate proceedings.

The proof required organizing program records around who held authority, what the records showed, and how state decisions affected the defined group of providers.

The matter added large-record trial preparation and appellate preservation to Pfau's work in individual and coordinated civil litigation — confirmation that the same courtroom craft serving individual survivors scales to a classwide record.

Practice and Background

Pfau is a partner at Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala in Seattle, the firm that bears his name. He is admitted in Washington, New York, and Illinois and before the Supreme Court of the United States.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1991.