Fain Anderson VanDerhoef Rosendahl O’Halloran Spillane PLLC

Focus and practice areas

This Seattle litigation firm operates under the name FAVROS, short for Fain Anderson VanDerhoef Rosendahl O'Halloran Spillane PLLC, and keeps a second office in Tacoma. Its work covers civil and commercial litigation, healthcare matters and appeals. The attorneys are licensed in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and California, which gives the firm a working reach across much of the western United States.

The practice sorts into a few clear lanes.Healthcare litigation and advice form a major part of the practice. Business and commercial disputes make up a second. Appellate work runs alongside both. As a reviewer, I read that structure as a firm that keeps its attorneys close to courtroom and regulatory work.

The site names twelve attorneys across the two offices. That is a mid-sized bench for a litigation shop, large enough to staff a matter with more than one lawyer and small enough that clients tend to deal with the same named attorneys throughout a case.

How the team is built

The firm's name carries six surnames: Fain, Anderson, VanDerhoef, Rosendahl, O'Halloran and Spillane. The attorneys page lists twelve lawyers in all, among them Thomas H. Fain and Christopher H. Anderson, whose names open the masthead, along with Michele C. Atkins, Lidiya I. Bayliyeva, Quinn K. Brown, Eron Z. Cannon, Rhys C. Colson, Joseph V. Gardner, Hunter A. Gregg, Taryn M. Harris, Michelle Hyer and Galilee (Gal) K. Kamai.

The site gives a name, an office location and a direct email address for each attorney. It does not list titles, biographies, law schools or admission dates, and it does not state a founding year for the firm. A reader who wants to weigh seniority or background will need to ask directly. What the roster does show is a team split across two offices with a shared litigation focus.

How the healthcare practice works

The healthcare group represents providers and institutions on the defense side of medical disputes. Its named clients include physicians, hospitals, dentists, nurses, clinics, long-term care facilities and academic medical centers. The client list reaches solo practitioners and large teaching institutions alike, and the legal questions change with the size of the client.

Malpractice and negligence defense

The core litigation work covers medical malpractice and corporate negligence defense. In a malpractice case the firm defends a clinical decision against a claim that care fell below the accepted standard. Corporate negligence claims move the focus from a single provider to how a hospital hired, supervised or credentialed its staff. Defending both means the firm reads medical records, works with expert witnesses and prepares clinicians to testify.

A malpractice case tends to follow a set path. It opens with a complaint, then moves through discovery, where each side gathers records and takes depositions. Expert disclosure follows, since these cases usually turn on what qualified physicians say about the standard of care. Many matters settle at mediation before trial, though a defense team prepares each file as if it will reach a jury. Handling that sequence for hospitals and individual clinicians alike is the daily texture of the practice.

The group also handles medical product liability. These cases test whether a device or a drug caused harm, and they usually draw in engineering or pharmacological evidence alongside the clinical record. That kind of proof puts a premium on lawyers who can read technical material and question the experts who produced it.

Licensing, credentialing and compliance

A large part of the healthcare work happens away from a jury. The firm represents providers in licensing and disciplinary proceedings, credentialing disputes and peer review. A licensing matter generally goes before a state board that can restrict or revoke the right to practice, and it runs more like an administrative hearing than a trial. Credentialing disputes decide whether a clinician keeps admitting privileges at a hospital. Peer review examines a colleague's clinical performance inside the institution. The firm's job in each is to protect the provider's ability to keep working while the record is tested.

On the advisory side the firm counsels healthcare organizations on regulatory compliance, risk management, privacy, mandatory reporting and internal policies. This is the preventive half of the practice, the work that aims to keep a problem out of litigation in the first place. In my opinion, a healthcare group that pairs courtroom defense with day-to-day compliance advice tends to understand its clients' pressures better than one that appears only after a claim is filed.

That compliance advice touches areas that carry real penalties when they go wrong. Privacy work concerns patient records and the state and federal rules that govern them. Mandatory reporting covers the situations where a provider has a legal duty to notify authorities, such as suspected abuse or certain communicable conditions. Risk management sets the internal policies that decide how staff respond before a lawyer is ever called. Advising on that groundwork keeps the firm close to how healthcare organizations actually run.

Behavioral health matters

The firm names a behavioral health strand within the healthcare practice. It handles civil commitment proceedings, guardianships and provider licensing questions. Civil commitment cases decide whether a person can be treated or held without consent, and they carry both clinical and constitutional weight. Guardianship work asks a court to appoint someone to make decisions for an adult who cannot make them alone. Both kinds of matter move quickly and touch people at vulnerable moments, so procedure and timing count as much as the underlying facts.

Work beyond healthcare

Outside the medical field the firm represents businesses, governmental entities, nonprofit organizations and individuals. The disputes it names here are commercial litigation, product liability and premises liability. That mix points to a general civil litigation capability the firm applies to clients well outside the clinic and the hospital.

Commercial litigation covers disagreements between businesses over contracts, obligations and money. Premises liability concerns injuries that happen on someone's property, and the defense usually turns on what the owner knew and what steps the owner took. Premises and product cases share a rhythm with the healthcare defense work, since each turns on cause, on records and on expert testimony about what a reasonable party should have done. A firm built around that kind of proof can move attorneys between a hospital file and a commercial dispute while keeping the same method.

Representing governmental and nonprofit clients alongside private businesses is worth noting. Public bodies answer to their own rules on records, immunity and procedure, and a firm that takes that work has to keep those distinctions in view from the first filing.

Appeals and how they are handled

The firm keeps a dedicated appellate practice. Its appellate attorneys handle appeals in state and federal courts, and they take both internal appeals from the firm's own trial matters and referred appeals from outside counsel. Taking referred appeals means other lawyers send their appellate work to the firm, which is a normal way appellate reputations grow.

An appeal does not retry the facts. It asks a higher court to check whether the trial court applied the law correctly, and the standard of review sets how much deference the appeals court gives the decision below. That is why appellate work rewards close reading of the record and tight written argument. The craft differs from trial work, and it draws on a different set of muscles.

Keeping appellate attorneys in-house has a practical effect on the trial side as well. A lawyer who knows how an appeals court reads a record tends to build that record carefully during the trial itself, framing objections and rulings with the next stage in mind. The two functions feed each other inside one firm.

Reach across five states

For a healthcare system that operates clinics in more than one state, a defense team admitted across the region can keep the same lawyers on a matter as it crosses a border. That continuity helps when the underlying facts, the medical records and the witnesses stay the same while the forum changes. The firm's admissions in five western states line up with that kind of client.

Attorneys admitted in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and California can follow clients and disputes across state lines, which suits institutional clients that run regional networks. The two offices, in Seattle and Tacoma, keep the firm close to the main trial courts of western Washington, where much of its litigation and healthcare work is centered.