FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
Oregon’s Foster Children Finally Have a Fighter in Their Corner — Justice for Kids® Brings Florida’s Most Powerful Child Welfare Law Firm to Portland to Confront Abuse, Sexual Exploitation, and the System That Keeps Failing Kids
After Decades of Landmark Results for Injured and Neglected Children Across the Country, Kelley Kronenberg’s Justice for Kids® Division Establishes Pacific Northwest Operations to Deliver Accountability to Oregon’s Most Broken Child Welfare System
PORTLAND, Ore. / FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is a question that child welfare attorneys hear from Oregon families more than almost any other: why is it so hard to find a law firm that actually understands what our child went through inside the foster care system — and knows how to do something about it?
The answer, until now, has been painfully simple. The kind of specialized, exclusively child-welfare-focused legal practice that can effectively take on a state agency like the Oregon Department of Human Services, pursue constitutional civil rights claims on behalf of injured foster children, and deliver the depth of forensic and expert resources that complex child abuse cases require simply did not exist in Oregon in the way that families needed it to.
Justice for Kids®, a division of Kelley Kronenberg and one of Florida’s most storied and powerful law firms, is here to change that.
The firm has officially opened a Portland office, extending its nationally recognized child welfare litigation practice to Oregon and making available — for the first time to Oregon families — the kind of dedicated, battle-tested legal advocacy that has defined Justice for Kids®’ reputation across Florida and the broader United States. Anchored by Oregon-licensed trial attorney and Co-Business Unit Leader Justin Grosz and guided by national child welfare pioneer Howard M. Talenfeld, Justice for Kids® arrives as a proven Oregon child abuse injury law firm with the credibility, resources, and singular focus on children’s rights that Oregon’s foster care crisis demands.
For families who have been searching for answers, for advocates who have watched children fall through the cracks of a broken system, and for former foster youth who were harmed and never heard — the wait is over.
Florida Roots, National Reach, Oregon Focus
Justice for Kids® was built in Florida, where the child welfare landscape is vast, legally complex, and the site of some of the most significant child welfare litigation in American history. The firm carved out its identity not by practicing child welfare law as a sideline, but by making it the exclusive focus of everything it does. No other case types. No divided attention. Only children — children harmed by foster care systems, residential facilities, disability programs, government agencies, and the institutions that were supposed to keep them safe and failed profoundly to do so.
That singular focus produced results that built the firm’s reputation from the ground up. Significant verdicts for children physically abused in licensed foster homes. Major settlements for children sexually exploited in placements that were never adequately monitored. Civil rights recoveries for children whose constitutional rights were violated by agencies operating with deliberate indifference to known dangers. Adoption fraud and misrepresentation cases that forced agencies to answer for withholding critical information from families who trusted them completely.
Every lesson learned in Florida, every litigation strategy refined over decades of complex child welfare cases, and every expert relationship developed in the course of building one of the country’s most effective child advocacy practices — all of it is now directed at Oregon.
As an established foster care child abuse lawyer in Oregon team with national credentials and local licensure, Justice for Kids® is not a firm that is learning Oregon’s child welfare landscape from scratch. It is a firm applying proven expertise to a system whose failures are well documented and whose children have been waiting far too long for the caliber of legal representation they deserve.
Oregon’s Foster Care System and the Children Paying the Price for Its Failures
Oregon’s child welfare crisis is not a secret. It has been documented in federal court filings, state audit reports, independent oversight reviews, and investigative journalism that has consistently painted a portrait of an agency — the Oregon Department of Human Services — operating beyond its capacity and beneath its legal obligations.
The Wyatt B. v. Brown class action, initiated in 2016 and resolved through a landmark 2022 settlement, became the defining legal document of Oregon’s foster care failures. It exposed a system in which children were cycled through unstable placement after unstable placement with minimal safety planning and no coherent effort to match a child’s specific needs with an appropriate environment. It documented the deeply troubling practice of “hoteling” — placing foster children in ODHS offices, government buildings, and hotel rooms because the agency lacked the foster home capacity to house them appropriately. It revealed a chronic shortage of qualified caregivers, a caseworker turnover rate that made consistent oversight impossible, and a mental health service delivery system so inadequate that children with serious psychiatric needs went without treatment for months at a time.
The 2022 settlement mandated reform. The years since have confirmed that mandated reform and delivered reform remain two different things. Placement shortages persist. Hoteling continues. Children with complex needs are still being placed in environments that cannot serve them. The structural conditions that allowed ODHS to harm children for years have not been fully dismantled.
For every child harmed during that gap between mandate and reality, Justice for Kids® is prepared to act. As a dedicated attorney for abused child in foster care in Oregon, the firm pursues accountability not as a theoretical exercise but as a practical, evidence-driven, results-oriented legal mission on behalf of real children whose injuries are real, whose futures have been affected, and whose cases deserve the best legal representation available.
Physical Abuse and Serious Injury: The Full Weight of Justice for Kids®’ Experience
Physical abuse inside Oregon’s licensed foster homes follows patterns that Justice for Kids® has studied, litigated, and addressed for more than two decades. The patterns are consistent across states: inadequate background screening of caregivers, failure to investigate prior complaints with genuine rigor, monitoring visits that are too infrequent or too superficial to detect warning signs, and a placement process driven by availability rather than safety and suitability.
When a child in ODHS custody is physically abused — struck, choked, subjected to degrading punishment, or seriously injured by a caregiver that the state was responsible for vetting and supervising — the legal accountability does not rest with the perpetrator alone. ODHS made decisions at every stage of that placement. It screened the foster parent, or failed to. It reviewed prior complaints, or dismissed them. It conducted monitoring visits, or neglected to. It had opportunities to intervene before a child was harmed, and it did not take them.
Justice for Kids® pursues that full chain of accountability. The firm’s legal team reviews the complete ODHS case file, retains child welfare standards experts, consults with medical professionals who can document the nature and severity of physical injuries, and builds cases that reflect the true scope of the agency’s responsibility. Physical abuse cases in Oregon’s foster care system are not accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of identifiable failures — and Justice for Kids® knows how to prove it.
Child Sexual Abuse in Oregon Foster Care: The Crisis That Demands the Most Specialized Legal Response
Sexual abuse of children inside Oregon’s foster care system is among the most devastating, the most underreported, and the most legally complex dimensions of the state’s child welfare crisis. It is also the area where the gap between the harm children have suffered and the accountability agencies have faced is perhaps the most profound.
Foster children are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual abuse. Many have prior trauma histories that make them targets. Many are in shared living situations — group homes, residential treatment programs, multi-child foster placements — where opportunities for abuse exist and where appropriate supervision is frequently absent. And many have learned, from repeated painful experience, that adults in positions of authority may not believe them, protect them, or act when they disclose what is happening to them.
Sexual abuse in Oregon foster care occurs in multiple contexts that Justice for Kids® is specifically equipped to address. It is perpetrated by foster parents who passed inadequate background investigations. By adults present in foster homes whose history and risk level should have prevented the placement entirely. By staff at group homes and residential programs where hiring standards and supervision were insufficient. By older residents in congregate care settings where no meaningful safety planning was in place.
In every context, the individual perpetrator bears primary criminal and civil responsibility. And in every context, ODHS bears the legal responsibility for the systemic failures — the inadequate screening, the insufficient monitoring, the slow response to disclosures, the failure to remove a child from danger when warning signs were present — that created the conditions for abuse.
As the leading child sex abuse law firm in Portland Oregon, Justice for Kids® handles these cases with an approach that is simultaneously legally aggressive and deeply sensitive to the human dimensions of what has occurred. The firm works with forensic experts, trauma-informed mental health professionals, and child development specialists to build cases that document the full extent of the child’s injuries — physical, psychological, developmental, and relational — and that present those injuries with the clarity and force that courts and juries can understand and respond to.
Civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 are a powerful component of Justice for Kids®’ sexual abuse litigation. When ODHS’s failure to protect a child from sexual abuse reflects deliberate indifference to a known and foreseeable risk, the constitutional dimension of that failure creates additional legal theories and additional avenues of accountability that a general personal injury practice might overlook entirely. Justice for Kids® deploys these theories with the precision and expertise that two decades of child welfare civil rights litigation has produced.
Disabled Children in Oregon Foster Care: Overlooked, Underserved, and Entitled to Far More
Children with disabilities inside Oregon’s foster care system occupy a uniquely difficult position. They have the most complex needs, the most limited placement options, the most extensive legal rights — and the most consistent experience of having those rights ignored. Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice treats disabled foster children not as a specialized subcategory but as a central priority, because the documented failures of ODHS with respect to this population are among the system’s most serious and most consequential.
Federal law is explicit. Children with disabilities in state custody are entitled to placements that can actually meet their needs. They are entitled to continuation of medically necessary services during placement transitions. They are entitled to IEPs that follow them, are implemented consistently, and are supported by active coordination between ODHS and the relevant educational agencies. They are entitled to caregivers who have been trained, supported, and resourced to provide disability-informed care.
Oregon’s child welfare system fails these children in ways that are both dramatic and mundane. Dramatic failures include placement in unnecessarily restrictive institutional settings — psychiatric hospitals, residential treatment programs, or out-of-state facilities — not because those placements are clinically warranted but because ODHS has exhausted its community-based options. Mundane failures — which are no less harmful — include the slow accumulation of missed therapy appointments, discontinued medication management, violated IEP provisions, and the grinding loss of developmental progress that occurs when a disabled child is placed in an environment that simply cannot serve them.
As the foremost disabled child abuse law firm in Oregon, Justice for Kids® pursues claims for disabled foster children through multiple overlapping legal frameworks: personal injury and negligence claims, civil rights litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, claims under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and constitutional claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 when the severity and persistence of ODHS’s failures rises to the level of deliberate indifference to a disabled child’s clearly established federal rights.
The firm builds these cases with disability law specialists, medical professionals, educational experts, and child development consultants who can translate the complexity of a disabled child’s needs and the extent of ODHS’s failures into a clear, compelling, and fully supported legal presentation.
The Oregon Team: Justin Grosz and Howard M. Talenfeld
Justin Grosz, Oregon-licensed attorney, Co-Business Unit Leader, and Partner at Justice for Kids®, leads the firm’s Portland operations with more than 230 jury trials to verdict and a career devoted exclusively 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 immediately and powerfully effective for every Oregon family that reaches out. Grosz brings the firm’s national methodology to Oregon’s specific legal landscape with precision, depth, and the kind of trial-tested confidence that complex child welfare cases require.
Howard M. Talenfeld, founder of Justice for Kids®, provides the national child welfare perspective and strategic depth that sets the firm apart. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org) and has spent decades securing landmark results for children harmed by government systems across the country.
“Oregon’s children deserve the same caliber of legal advocacy that has produced results for children in Florida and across this country. Justice for Kids® is here, we are ready, and we will not rest until every child harmed by this system has the representation and the accountability they are owed.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Statewide Representation for Oregon’s Children
Justice for Kids® represents children and families in Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and communities throughout Oregon. All consultations are completely free and confidential. The firm works exclusively on a contingency fee basis — no fees are ever 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.
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.
