FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
The Law Firm Oregon’s Foster Children Have Needed for Years Is Finally Here — Justice for Kids® Opens Portland Office to Fight for Abused, Neglected, and Sexually Exploited Children Across the Pacific Northwest
Florida’s Premier Child Welfare Litigation Practice Expands West, Delivering Constitutional Advocacy, Forensic Expertise, and Two Decades of Hard-Won Results Directly to Oregon’s Most Vulnerable Foster Children and the Families Who Love Them
PORTLAND, Ore. / FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — For years, advocates working inside Oregon’s child welfare system have described a particular and painful frustration. When a foster child is physically abused by a caregiver the state never properly screened, when a teenager is sexually exploited in a placement that was never adequately monitored, when a child with disabilities loses years of developmental progress because ODHS placed them somewhere that could not serve their needs — the families, guardians, and advocates surrounding that child often face the same impossible wall: finding legal representation with the specialized knowledge, constitutional litigation experience, and exclusive child welfare focus to actually do something about it.
Justice for Kids®, the child welfare division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of the most powerful and respected law firms to emerge from the state of Florida, has opened a Portland office to tear down that wall.
With Oregon-licensed trial attorney and Co-Business Unit Leader Justin Grosz leading day-to-day operations and national child welfare pioneer Howard M. Talenfeld providing strategic depth and national perspective, Justice for Kids® establishes itself in the Pacific Northwest as the definitive Oregon child abuse injury law firm for children harmed by ODHS, Oregon’s foster care providers, residential facilities, and every institution that was supposed to keep children safe and failed them instead.
Oregon’s foster children have waited long enough. Justice for Kids® is here.
A Practice Built on One Promise: Children First, Always
Justice for Kids® was built in Florida on a conviction that sounds simple but is remarkably rare in practice: that children harmed by government care systems deserve the same quality, intensity, and sophistication of legal advocacy as any other category of injury victim — and that delivering that quality requires exclusive, undivided focus on child welfare law and nothing else.
No general personal injury caseload running alongside child welfare files. No divided attention between commercial litigation and foster care abuse cases. Only children — only the full universe of legal claims available to children harmed by foster care agencies, residential treatment programs, government child welfare systems, and the institutions and individuals that operate within them.
That exclusive focus produced something that general practice firms cannot replicate: genuine, deep, tested expertise in every legal dimension of child welfare harm. Personal injury and negligence claims against ODHS and contracted providers. Constitutional civil rights litigation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for government actors who violated children’s rights with deliberate indifference. Disability law claims under the ADA, Section 504, and IDEA for children whose federally protected needs were systematically ignored. Sexual abuse cases pursued with forensic rigor and trauma-informed sensitivity. Adoption fraud and misrepresentation cases for families deceived by agencies that withheld critical information.
As a committed foster care child abuse lawyer in Oregon team, Justice for Kids® brings that full spectrum of capability to Oregon — not as a new experiment, but as a proven methodology that has delivered significant results for children and families in Florida and across the country for more than two decades.
Oregon’s Child Welfare Crisis: The Context Behind the Expansion
The Justice for Kids® expansion into Oregon is not a routine business decision. It is a direct response to a documented, ongoing, and federally scrutinized child welfare crisis that has been harming Oregon’s foster children for years and that continues to demand serious legal attention.
Oregon’s Department of Human Services has operated under intense legal and regulatory scrutiny stemming from the landmark Wyatt B. v. Brown class action, initiated in 2016 and resolved through a sweeping 2022 settlement. The litigation exposed conditions inside Oregon’s foster care system that shocked even experienced child welfare professionals: children cycled through placement after placement without safety planning or continuity of care; teenagers housed in ODHS offices and hotel rooms through the now-notorious practice of “hoteling” because the agency lacked appropriate placement capacity; youth with serious mental health conditions going without treatment for extended periods; and a caseworker shortage so severe that meaningful oversight of active placements was functionally impossible across large portions of the system.
The 2022 settlement mandated comprehensive reforms. Independent oversight reports in the years since have confirmed that the gap between mandated reform and delivered reform remains wide and consequential. Placement shortages persist. Hoteling continues. Children with complex needs are still being placed in environments that cannot accommodate them. The structural failures that defined Oregon’s child welfare crisis have not been resolved — and children continue to pay the price for them every day.
As a dedicated attorney for abused child in foster care in Oregon, Justice for Kids® pursues accountability for the children harmed in that gap — with the evidence-driven, results-oriented legal approach that its Florida track record demonstrates and that Oregon’s families now have access to for the first time.
Physical Abuse and Serious Injury: Accountability That Goes Beyond the Perpetrator
Physical abuse of children in Oregon foster care is not a problem of isolated individuals. It is a problem of systemic failure — of screening processes that are inadequate, complaint investigation procedures that are insufficiently rigorous, monitoring practices that are too infrequent to detect warning signs, and placement decisions driven by availability rather than suitability and safety.
When a child in ODHS custody is physically abused — beaten, choked, injured, or subjected to degrading and cruel treatment by a caregiver the state was responsible for vetting, approving, and supervising — the legal accountability extends through every ODHS decision that contributed to putting that child in that situation. Justice for Kids® investigates the full record: what ODHS knew before the placement was made, what it learned during the placement that should have triggered intervention, and what opportunities to protect the child were missed at every stage.
The firm retains child welfare standards experts, medical professionals, and forensic specialists to build cases that reflect the true scope of ODHS’s responsibility and the true extent of the child’s injuries. Physical abuse cases in Oregon’s foster care system are, in case after case, the predictable outcomes of identifiable agency failures. Justice for Kids® knows how to identify those failures, document them thoroughly, and present them with the legal force that produces real accountability.
Child Sexual Abuse: Oregon’s Most Urgent Child Welfare Crisis and Justice for Kids®’ Most Critical Work
Sexual exploitation and abuse of children inside Oregon’s foster care system represents the dimension of the state’s child welfare crisis that demands the most specialized, the most sensitive, and the most legally sophisticated response. Foster children are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual abuse — more likely to have prior trauma that increases their risk, more likely to be in shared living situations where abuse opportunities exist, and too often without a trusted adult advocate who will respond appropriately when they disclose what is happening to them.
Sexual abuse in Oregon foster care occurs across multiple settings and involves multiple categories of perpetrators. Foster parents whose background screening was incomplete. Household members whose history should have prevented the placement. Staff at residential programs and group homes where supervision was minimal and vetting was inadequate. Older residents in congregate care settings where safety planning was absent or purely nominal. In each scenario, ODHS bears legal responsibility not only for the harm itself but for every failure of screening, oversight, safety planning, and responsive action that created the conditions enabling that harm.
As the leading child sex abuse law firm in Portland Oregon, Justice for Kids® handles these cases with the full combination of forensic expertise, constitutional legal sophistication, and trauma-informed sensitivity they require. The firm works with leading trauma specialists, forensic experts, and child development professionals to document the complete scope of a child’s injuries — immediate, long-term, developmental, and relational — and to build a legal case that reflects both the magnitude of the harm and the full extent of the agency’s accountability.
Civil rights litigation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 plays a central role in Justice for Kids®’ sexual abuse practice. When ODHS’s failure to protect a child from foreseeable sexual harm reflects deliberate indifference — when the agency had warnings it ignored, complaints it dismissed, or risk information it failed to act on — the constitutional dimension of that failure creates powerful legal theories that extend beyond traditional negligence and that only a firm with deep constitutional child welfare expertise can fully deploy.
Disabled Children in Oregon Foster Care: The Most Protected, the Most Neglected
There is a painful irony at the center of disabled children’s experience in Oregon’s foster care system: no population has more extensive legal protections, and no population has been more consistently failed by the agency legally obligated to honor those protections.
Children with disabilities in ODHS custody are entitled — under federal disability law, under the Constitution, and under Oregon’s own child welfare standards — to placements that can genuinely meet their needs, continuation of essential therapeutic services during transitions, properly developed and implemented individualized education programs, and protection from unnecessarily restrictive institutional placements that deprive them of liberty interests the law protects.
What Justice for Kids® sees in practice, and what Oregon’s own oversight findings document, is a pattern of consistent, serious failure across each of these obligations. Children with autism placed in homes where no one has been trained in their specific behavioral and communication needs. Children with psychiatric conditions whose medication management is disrupted during placement changes. Children whose IEPs are violated because coordination between ODHS and school districts is nonexistent. Children placed in restrictive institutional programs not because those settings are clinically appropriate but because ODHS has run out of community options.
The harm compounds silently — lost therapy progress, deteriorating behavioral health, worsening educational outcomes, and the deep psychological damage of being placed somewhere that cannot understand, accommodate, or genuinely care for who you are. By the time the damage becomes visible, it is often extensive and lasting.
As the foremost disabled child abuse law firm in Oregon, Justice for Kids® pursues these cases through personal injury and negligence claims, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The firm builds each case with disability specialists, medical professionals, and special education experts who can translate the complexity of a disabled child’s needs and the full scope of ODHS’s failures into clear and compelling legal arguments.
The Oregon Team
Justin Grosz, Oregon-licensed attorney, Co-Business Unit Leader, and Partner at Justice for Kids®, leads the Portland office with more than 230 jury trials to verdict and a career devoted entirely to children harmed in foster care, residential programs, and institutional settings. His command of Oregon courts, ODHS processes, and the state’s dependency system makes him a formidable and immediately effective advocate for every Oregon family that calls.
Howard M. Talenfeld, founder of Justice for Kids®, brings the national child welfare perspective, strategic depth, and decades of landmark results that define the firm’s approach in every state where it operates. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org).
“Oregon’s children are no different from the children Justice for Kids® has fought for across this country. They were placed in a system they did not choose, harmed by failures they did not cause, and left without the advocates they deserve. We are here to be those advocates — without reservation and without compromise.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Serving Oregon Statewide
Justice for Kids® represents children and families across Oregon including Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and all surrounding communities. All consultations are free and completely confidential. The firm works exclusively on a contingency fee basis — no fees are owed unless Justice for Kids® achieves a recovery.
About Justice for Kids®
Justice for Kids® is a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of Florida’s largest law firms, limiting its practice exclusively to children harmed by government child welfare systems, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, and institutions responsible for children’s safety. The firm has a proven national record of significant verdicts, settlements, and systemic reforms on behalf of abused, neglected, and exploited children nationwide.
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/
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