FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
Kelley Kronenberg’s Celebrated Child Advocacy Division Opens Portland Office to Battle Oregon’s Foster Care Abuse Crisis
The Broward County-Headquartered Law Firm That Has Redefined Child Welfare Litigation in Florida Now Brings Its Landmark Legal Firepower to the Pacific Northwest, Where Thousands of Oregon Foster Children Are Still Waiting for Justice
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. / PORTLAND, Ore. — South Florida’s legal community has watched Justice for Kids® build one of the most respected child welfare litigation practices in the United States right here in Broward County. For more than two decades, the firm — a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of the largest and most decorated law firms ever to call South Florida home — has been the name that families, advocates, and child welfare professionals across Florida turn to when a child has been abused, neglected, sexually exploited, or constitutionally wronged inside a government care system.
Now the rest of the country is going to find out what South Florida already knows.
Justice for Kids® has officially opened a Portland, Oregon office, extending its South Florida-forged reputation for uncompromising child welfare advocacy to a state whose foster care crisis has drawn federal scrutiny, generated landmark litigation, and left thousands of children without the specialized legal representation they need and deserve. Under the leadership of Justice for Kids® founder Howard M. Talenfeld — whose name has become synonymous with child welfare accountability in South Florida legal circles — and Oregon-licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz, the firm arrives in the Pacific Northwest as the most experienced and most capable Oregon child abuse injury law firm the state has ever seen.
For the South Florida legal and business community that has watched Justice for Kids® grow from a Florida-focused practice into a nationally recognized child advocacy force, this expansion represents the next chapter in a story that started right here in Broward County — and that continues to be driven by the same conviction that has always defined the firm: that children harmed by government systems deserve the best legal representation this country has to offer, and that no government agency is too powerful to be held accountable.
From South Florida to the Pacific Northwest: The Story Behind the Expansion
Justice for Kids® is a product of South Florida’s legal culture at its best — aggressive, results-driven, client-centered, and unwilling to accept that powerful institutions are beyond accountability. Kelley Kronenberg, the firm’s parent organization and one of South Florida’s most prominent law firms, built its reputation on exactly those values, and Justice for Kids® has carried them into the specialized world of child welfare litigation with results that have set national standards.
The Florida child welfare system is one of the largest and most complex in the country, and it has been the proving ground for everything Justice for Kids® brings to Oregon. The firm spent years developing the forensic resources, expert relationships, constitutional litigation strategies, and institutional knowledge of government child welfare systems that complex foster care abuse cases require. It pursued cases that other firms would not take, against agencies that other attorneys considered too formidable to challenge, and it produced results — significant verdicts, landmark settlements, systemic reforms — that changed the landscape for injured children not only in Florida but across the country.
That South Florida-built expertise is now fully deployed in Oregon. As a proven foster care child abuse lawyer in Oregon resource with the national credentials and Oregon licensure to operate effectively from day one, Justice for Kids® brings everything it has developed in Broward County and across Florida directly to the Pacific Northwest. The firm is not experimenting with a new practice area in a new state. It is applying a deeply refined and extensively tested methodology to a child welfare crisis that has been demanding exactly this kind of response for years.
Oregon’s Foster Care Crisis: Why South Florida’s Premier Child Welfare Firm Felt Called to Act
The Justice for Kids® expansion into Oregon was not a routine strategic decision. It was a response to a documented, federally scrutinized child welfare emergency that has been harming Oregon’s most vulnerable children for more than a decade and that continues to demand serious legal attention.
Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the state agency responsible for foster care, has been the subject of intense legal and regulatory scrutiny arising from the landmark Wyatt B. v. Brown class action. Filed in 2016, the case exposed conditions inside Oregon’s foster care system that appalled child welfare professionals nationwide: children transferred from placement to placement without coherent safety planning, teenagers housed in government offices and hotel rooms through the practice of “hoteling” because ODHS lacked adequate foster home capacity, youth with serious mental health conditions going without treatment for months, and a systemic caseworker shortage that made meaningful oversight of active placements nearly impossible across large segments of the system.
Oregon reached a sweeping settlement in Wyatt B. in 2022. The years since have confirmed through independent oversight reports and investigative findings that the gap between the reforms the settlement required and the conditions Oregon’s foster children actually experience remains significant and consequential. Placement shortages persist. Children with complex behavioral and medical needs continue to be placed in environments that cannot accommodate them. The structural failures at the core of Oregon’s child welfare crisis have not been resolved — and children are still being harmed because of them every day.
For every child caught in that gap — physically abused in a placement that was never safe, sexually exploited in an environment that was never properly supervised, or denied the disability services the law guarantees them — Justice for Kids® is prepared to act as a committed attorney for abused child in foster care in Oregon, pursuing accountability with the evidence-driven rigor and constitutional sophistication that South Florida’s most demanding legal environment has produced.
Physical Abuse and Serious Injury: The Full Chain of ODHS Accountability
South Florida attorneys who follow Justice for Kids®’ work know that the firm does not build physical abuse cases around individual perpetrators alone. It builds them around systems — around the screening failures, the complaint investigation inadequacies, the monitoring deficiencies, and the placement decision errors that collectively create the conditions in which a child is harmed.
When a child in Oregon foster care is physically abused by a caregiver the state licensed, approved, and was responsible for supervising, ODHS’s legal exposure extends through every decision it made — or failed to make — at every stage of that placement. Justice for Kids® pursues that exposure methodically and thoroughly, reviewing the complete ODHS case record, engaging child welfare standards experts, retaining medical professionals to document the nature and long-term consequences of physical injuries, and constructing legal arguments that hold the agency accountable for the full scope of its failures.
Physical abuse of foster children is not unforeseeable. It is the predictable outcome of identifiable agency failures. Justice for Kids® has spent two decades in South Florida proving that — and it brings that same capacity to prove it in Oregon.
Child Sexual Abuse in Oregon Foster Care: The Crisis That Demands South Florida’s Best
Of all the harms documented inside Oregon’s foster care system, sexual abuse of children is among the most devastating, the most difficult for victims to disclose, and the most clearly connected to systemic agency failures that a sophisticated legal practice can identify and pursue.
Foster children are significantly more vulnerable to sexual abuse than children in the general population. Many carry prior trauma histories that increase their risk. Many are placed in shared living environments — group homes, multi-child foster placements, residential programs — where abuse opportunities are present and supervision is frequently inconsistent. And many have learned, through painful experience, that adults in authority positions may not respond appropriately when they speak up about what is happening to them.
As the leading child sex abuse law firm in Portland Oregon, Justice for Kids® approaches these cases with the full combination of forensic expertise, constitutional legal sophistication, and trauma-informed sensitivity that they demand. Sexual abuse in Oregon foster care is perpetrated by inadequately screened foster parents, household members whose history should have prevented licensure, staff at residential programs where supervision was minimal, and older residents in congregate settings where safety planning was absent. In every scenario, ODHS bears legal responsibility for the failures that created the conditions enabling harm.
The firm works with leading trauma specialists, forensic professionals, and child development experts to document the complete scope of each child’s injuries — physical, psychological, developmental, and relational — and to build cases that reflect both the magnitude of what happened and the full extent of the agency’s accountability. Civil rights litigation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is a powerful component of Justice for Kids®’ sexual abuse practice, deployed when ODHS’s conduct reflects deliberate indifference to a child’s known and foreseeable risk — a legal theory that South Florida’s most experienced child welfare attorneys know how to pursue with precision and force.
Disabled Children in Oregon: The Population With the Most Rights and the Least Protection
South Florida child welfare practitioners are well acquainted with the particular vulnerability of disabled children inside government care systems. Children with disabilities have more extensive legal protections than virtually any other population — and they are, with troubling consistency, among the children most seriously harmed when those protections are ignored.
Disabled children in Oregon foster care are legally entitled to appropriate placements, continuation of essential therapies and medical supports during placement transitions, properly implemented individualized education programs, and protection from unnecessarily restrictive institutional placements that the Constitution and federal disability law prohibit. Oregon’s documented record of failing to deliver on these obligations is extensive.
Children with autism placed in homes without disability-specific training. Children with psychiatric conditions whose medication management is disrupted during placement transitions. Children whose IEPs are violated because ODHS and school districts are not coordinating. Children placed in restrictive institutional settings not because restriction is clinically appropriate but because ODHS has run out of community placement options. The harm compounds over time — lost developmental progress, worsening behavioral health, deteriorating educational outcomes — until it becomes impossible to reverse.
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 litigation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The firm engages disability specialists, medical professionals, and special education experts to build cases that translate the complexity of a disabled child’s needs and the scope of ODHS’s failures into compelling, thoroughly supported legal arguments that produce real results.
The Oregon Team: South Florida Expertise, Pacific Northwest Commitment
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 built entirely around representing children harmed in foster care, residential programs, and institutional settings. His deep knowledge of Oregon courts, ODHS processes, and Oregon dependency law makes him an immediately powerful advocate for every family that reaches out.
Howard M. Talenfeld, Justice for Kids® founder and one of South Florida’s most recognized names in child welfare law, brings the national strategic perspective and decades of landmark results that define the firm’s approach in every market where it operates. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org) and remains the driving force behind the mission that has taken Justice for Kids® from South Florida to the national stage.
“South Florida gave Justice for Kids® its foundation, its values, and its standard of excellence. We carry all of that to Oregon — because the children there deserve exactly what we have always delivered here: legal advocacy that does not quit, does not compromise, and does not rest until justice is done.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Serving Children and Families Across Oregon
Justice for Kids® represents clients throughout Oregon including Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and every surrounding community. All consultations are free and completely confidential. The firm works exclusively on a contingency fee basis — no fees are ever owed 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 South Florida’s largest and most respected law firms, with offices throughout Florida and now expanding nationally. 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, and systemic reforms on behalf of abused, neglected, sexually exploited, and injured 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/
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