FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
One of America’s Most Decorated Child Welfare Law Firms Plants Its Flag in the Pacific Northwest — Justice for Kids® Opens Oregon Office to Champion Every Child the System Has Forgotten, Injured, and Failed
The Florida-Based Legal Force Behind Decades of Child Welfare Accountability Now Brings Its Unmatched Expertise in Foster Care Abuse, Sexual Exploitation, Disability Neglect, and Civil Rights Litigation Directly to Oregon’s Most Vulnerable Children
PORTLAND, Ore. / FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is a particular kind of silence that follows a child who has been harmed inside a government system. It is not the silence of peace or resolution. It is the silence of a child who has learned that the adults responsible for their safety will not be held accountable — that the agency that placed them in a dangerous home, ignored their cries for help, failed to investigate their disclosures, or stripped them of their constitutional rights will continue operating with little consequence while the child is left to carry the weight of what happened to them alone.
Justice for Kids® has spent more than two decades breaking that silence in Florida and across the nation. Now it is coming to Oregon to break it there too.
Justice for Kids®, the nationally celebrated child welfare division of Kelley Kronenberg — one of Florida’s largest, most powerful, and most respected law firms — has officially expanded operations into Oregon, establishing a Portland office that will serve as the firm’s Pacific Northwest base for child welfare litigation, civil rights advocacy, and systemic accountability work. Founded by Howard M. Talenfeld and supported in Oregon by licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz, Justice for Kids® arrives as a battle-tested Oregon child abuse injury law firm with a track record that Oregon families, advocates, and child welfare professionals can rely on without reservation.
The firm’s arrival is not a business decision. It is a moral one. Oregon’s child welfare system has been failing its most vulnerable children for years — and the documentation of those failures is extensive, credible, and deeply troubling. Justice for Kids® has reviewed that record carefully. It has listened to the families, advocates, and former foster youth who have been describing these failures for years without adequate legal support. And it has made a commitment: Oregon’s children will no longer fight this battle without one of the country’s most formidable child welfare practices standing beside them.
Why Oregon — and Why Now
Florida attorneys and child welfare professionals who follow national developments in foster care law are well acquainted with Oregon’s struggles. The state’s child welfare system, administered by the Oregon Department of Human Services, has faced years of federal legal scrutiny, sweeping class-action litigation, damning independent audits, and persistent investigative reporting that has documented failure after failure inside a system responsible for the safety of thousands of children every year.
Oregon typically houses between 5,000 and 6,000 children in foster care at any given time. These are children who have already experienced significant trauma — abuse, neglect, family instability, loss — before they ever arrive in state custody. They come to ODHS already wounded, already in need of the kind of consistent, skilled, and compassionate care that trauma recovery requires. What they receive too often is something far different: unstable placements, undertrained caregivers, overwhelmed caseworkers managing caseloads that no human being can safely handle, and a bureaucratic apparatus so consumed with managing crises that it rarely has the capacity to prevent them.
The landmark class-action case Wyatt B. v. Brown, filed in 2016, pulled back the curtain on conditions inside Oregon’s foster care system that shocked even seasoned child welfare professionals. Children were being shuffled between placements with no coherent safety planning. Teenagers were being housed in ODHS offices and hotel rooms — a practice known as “hoteling” — because the agency could not find appropriate placements. Youth with serious mental health needs were going without treatment for months at a time. The 2022 settlement that resolved the case mandated sweeping reforms. But as Justice for Kids® well knows from decades of post-settlement monitoring in Florida and elsewhere, mandated reforms and implemented reforms are not the same thing. Oregon’s children are still waiting for the gap between those two realities to close.
Justice for Kids® is not here to wait. As a proven foster care child abuse lawyer in Oregon resource and dedicated legal team, the firm is here to pursue accountability for the children who have already been harmed while that gap remains open — and to ensure that every family in Oregon dealing with the aftermath of foster care abuse has access to the legal representation they need and deserve.
Physical Abuse, Serious Injury, and the Accountability Oregon Families Have Been Denied
Physical abuse of children inside Oregon’s foster care system is not a rare occurrence relegated to isolated bad actors. It is a documented, recurring pattern that reflects systemic failures at every level of ODHS operations — from the initial screening of foster parent applicants to the ongoing monitoring of active placements to the investigation and response to abuse reports once they are made.
When a child in ODHS custody is beaten, choked, subjected to cruel physical punishment, or seriously injured by a caregiver that the state licensed, placed, and was responsible for supervising, the legal responsibility does not begin and end with the individual who inflicted the harm. ODHS had a duty — a legal, enforceable, constitutional duty — to screen that caregiver thoroughly, to conduct meaningful background investigations, to respond to prior complaints with genuine rigor, and to monitor the placement with the frequency and attentiveness that the safety of a child in state custody demands.
When those duties are breached and a child is injured, Justice for Kids® pursues accountability across the entire chain of ODHS decision-making. The firm investigates what ODHS knew before it made the placement, what it learned during the placement that should have triggered intervention, and what it failed to do at each stage that would have kept the child safe. The resulting legal claims are built on a foundation of evidence — records, expert testimony, documented standards of care, and the firm’s deep institutional knowledge of how ODHS systems operate and where they break down.
As a dedicated attorney for abused child in foster care in Oregon, the Justice for Kids® legal team brings to each physical abuse case the same level of preparation, expertise, and commitment that has produced significant results for injured children in Florida and across the country. Oregon families dealing with the aftermath of physical abuse in a foster care setting should know that they do not have to navigate this process alone — and that the right legal representation can make an enormous difference in both the outcome of their case and the accountability of the system that failed their child.
Child Sexual Abuse in Oregon Foster Care: The Crisis That Demands Specialized Legal Advocacy
Of all the harms that can befall a child inside Oregon’s foster care system, sexual abuse is among the most devastating, the most long-lasting, and the most indicative of systemic failure at multiple levels. Children in foster care are statistically more vulnerable to sexual abuse than children in the general population. They are more likely to have prior trauma histories that make them targets. They are more likely to be in shared living situations — group homes, residential programs, foster placements with multiple children — where opportunities for abuse exist and where supervision may be inconsistent or inadequate.
And they are, in many cases, the least likely to have a trusted adult in their life who will believe them, advocate for them, and ensure that their disclosure is taken seriously and acted upon promptly.
Sexual abuse inside Oregon’s foster care system takes many forms. It is perpetrated by foster parents who were inadequately screened. By staff members in group homes and residential treatment facilities who were insufficiently supervised and insufficiently vetted. By older residents in congregate care settings where appropriate safety planning was never implemented. By adults in the household whose presence and history should have prevented licensure of the home entirely.
In each of these scenarios, ODHS’s potential liability extends far beyond the individual perpetrator. The agency’s obligations — to screen thoroughly, to monitor consistently, to investigate promptly, and to remove a child from danger the moment warning signs emerge — are clear, legally enforceable, and routinely violated in cases that Justice for Kids® sees across child welfare systems nationally.
As the foremost child sex abuse law firm in Portland Oregon, Justice for Kids® handles these cases with the specialized expertise, forensic rigor, and profound sensitivity they require. The firm works with leading sexual abuse trauma experts, forensic interviewers, child development specialists, and medical professionals to build cases that document both the abuse itself and the systemic failures that made it possible. It pursues accountability not only through compensatory damages for the child’s injuries, but through legal theories — including civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — that hold the agency responsible for its deliberate indifference to known dangers and its failure to protect children it was constitutionally obligated to keep safe.
Sexual abuse cases require an attorney who understands both the legal complexity and the human dimension of what has occurred. Justice for Kids® brings both.
Disabled Children in Oregon Foster Care: The Population ODHS Has Failed Most Consistently
Among all the populations harmed by Oregon’s child welfare failures, children with disabilities face a unique and compounding set of challenges that demand specialized legal attention. These are the children whose needs are the most complex, whose placement options are the most limited, whose rights are the most extensive — and whose experience inside Oregon’s foster care system has been, too often, the most damaging.
A child with autism spectrum disorder entering Oregon’s foster care system is legally entitled to a placement that can meet their specific therapeutic, behavioral, and educational needs. They are entitled to continuity of the services and routines that their development depends on. They are entitled to an individualized education program that follows them from placement to placement and is actually implemented — not simply filed, forgotten, and violated. They are entitled to caregivers with the training and support necessary to provide safe, appropriate care.
What happens in practice diverges dramatically from what the law requires. Children with significant disabilities are routinely placed in homes and facilities that lack the training, resources, and institutional knowledge to support them. Services are disrupted during transitions. Therapies are discontinued. Educational supports evaporate. IEPs are ignored because no one is coordinating between ODHS and the relevant school district. In some of the most serious cases, children with disabilities are placed in unnecessarily restrictive institutional settings — not because those settings are clinically appropriate, but because ODHS has exhausted its community placement options and has nowhere else to put them.
The regression that results from these failures is not abstract. It is documented in medical records, school assessments, and the accounts of families who watched a child lose months or years of hard-won developmental progress because the adults legally responsible for their care failed to communicate, plan, coordinate, or follow through.
As an experienced disabled child abuse law firm in Oregon, Justice for Kids® pursues claims for disabled children harmed inside Oregon’s foster care system using the full range of legal tools available — personal injury and negligence claims, civil rights litigation under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA-based claims, and constitutional claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 when ODHS’s conduct rises to the level of deliberate indifference to a disabled child’s clearly established rights.
These cases matter not only for the individual children involved. They matter because they send a signal — to ODHS, to contracted providers, and to the broader child welfare system — that disabled children in Oregon foster care are not invisible, their rights are not negotiable, and the agencies responsible for their care will be held fully accountable when those rights are violated.
The Oregon Team: Proven Leadership, Immediate Impact
Howard M. Talenfeld, founder of Justice for Kids® and one of the most accomplished child welfare advocates in the United States, has spent his career building a practice that others emulate and no one has matched. His experience spans landmark class-action litigation, major civil rights cases, complex individual injury matters, and the full spectrum of child welfare law that Oregon families will need. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org), bringing national policy insight and systemic reform experience to every case the Oregon practice undertakes.
Justin Grosz, Oregon-licensed attorney, Co-Business Unit Leader, and Partner at Justice for Kids®, brings more than 230 jury trial verdicts and decades of child welfare litigation experience to the Portland office. His deep knowledge of Oregon’s courts, ODHS processes, dependency proceedings, and contracted provider network makes him an immediately powerful advocate for every family that reaches out.
“Oregon’s children have been harmed long enough without the legal representation they deserve. Justice for Kids® built its reputation in Florida by refusing to accept that government systems are too powerful to hold accountable. We bring that same refusal to Oregon — and we will not stop until every child who was failed by this system has a voice, a case, and a chance at justice.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Representing Children and Families Across All of Oregon
Justice for Kids® serves clients throughout Oregon including Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and every community statewide. All consultations are free, confidential, and handled with the sensitivity these cases demand. The firm works on a contingency basis — no fees of any kind unless Justice for Kids® achieves a recovery on the client’s behalf.
About Justice for Kids®
Justice for Kids® is a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of Florida’s largest law firms. The practice limits its representation exclusively to children harmed by government child welfare systems, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, disability programs, and institutions responsible for children’s safety and well-being. The firm has a proven national record of securing significant verdicts, settlements, increased adoption subsidies, and meaningful systemic reforms on behalf of injured, abused, and neglected children.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Justice for Kids® | 6500 S Macadam Ave., Suite 380 Portland, OR 97239 Phone: 754-888-KIDS (5437) Toll-Free: 844-4KIDLAW (844-454-3529) Email: help@justiceforkids.com Website: https://justiceforkids.com/where-we-protect-kids/oregon/
The hiring of a lawyer is an important decision that should not be based solely upon advertisements. Before you decide, ask us to send you free written information about our qualifications and experience. Most cases result in a lower recovery. Results may not be typical and reflect awards before deduction for attorneys’ fees and expenses.
