Florida’s Most Trusted Child Welfare Law Firm Takes Its Fight for Injured and Neglected Children to Oregon — Justice for Kids® Brings National Advocacy, Civil Rights Litigation, and Relentless Accountability to Portland
Kelley Kronenberg’s Justice for Kids® Division Expands West, Extending Its Florida-Born Legacy of Fighting for Children’s Civil Rights, Catastrophic Injuries, and Systemic Neglect Into the Heart of Oregon’s Broken Foster Care System
PORTLAND, Ore. / FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — For more than two decades, families across Florida have known exactly where to turn when a child has been harmed by a government system that was supposed to protect them. They call Justice for Kids®. They call because the firm’s record speaks for itself — substantial verdicts, landmark settlements, systemic reforms, and an unwavering commitment to the children who have been silenced, injured, and failed by the very institutions entrusted with their safety.
Now, that same Florida-forged commitment is coming to Oregon.
Justice for Kids®, the nationally recognized child welfare division of Kelley Kronenberg — one of Florida’s largest and most respected law firms — has officially opened a Portland, Oregon office. The expansion brings the firm’s deep expertise in child civil rights litigation, foster care injury cases, and systemic neglect advocacy to a state where thousands of children in government custody continue to be harmed, overlooked, and denied the legal protection they are owed.
Leading the Oregon practice are two attorneys whose credentials represent the best of what Justice for Kids® has built in Florida and carried across the country: founder and national child welfare pioneer Howard M. Talenfeld, and Oregon-licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz. Together, they bring to the Pacific Northwest the same aggressive, evidence-driven, child-centered legal approach that has made Justice for Kids® a name that child welfare advocates, family attorneys, and injured families across Florida trust without reservation. As a committed Oregon child foster care abuse law firm, the firm is ready to pursue accountability at every level of Oregon’s child welfare system.
Built in Florida. Trusted Nationally. Fighting for Children Everywhere.
To understand what Justice for Kids® brings to Oregon, it helps to understand what the firm has built in Florida — and why its model of practice is so different from anything else available to families navigating child welfare crises.
Florida has one of the largest child welfare systems in the country. It has also been the site of some of the most significant child welfare litigation in American legal history. Justice for Kids® grew out of that landscape — a legal environment where the stakes were high, the systems were complex, and the children who needed advocates were among the most vulnerable people in the state.
What Talenfeld and his team built in Florida was not simply a litigation firm. It was a specialized, mission-driven practice that combined deep knowledge of government child welfare systems with a commitment to the full range of legal tools available to injured children — personal injury claims, civil rights litigation, class actions, adoption fraud and misrepresentation cases, and disability law matters. The firm developed relationships with child welfare experts, medical professionals, and forensic specialists who could support complex cases. It developed an understanding of how government agencies make decisions, document records, and respond to oversight — and how to use that knowledge to build cases that hold agencies accountable.
That model — refined over decades in Florida and tested in child welfare systems across the country — is exactly what Oregon needs. As a dedicated Portland child abuse law firm, Justice for Kids® arrives in Oregon not as an outsider learning a new field, but as a proven national force bringing hard-won expertise to a state where children and families have been waiting for exactly this kind of advocate.
Children’s Civil Rights: The Legal Foundation That Oregon’s Foster Children Deserve
At the core of Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice is a commitment to children’s civil rights — the constitutional and statutory protections that every child in government custody is entitled to, and that Oregon’s foster care system has violated in documented, repeated, and systemic ways.
Foster children are not simply recipients of government services. They are individuals with constitutional rights — rights that do not disappear because a child is in state custody. In fact, when the government takes custody of a child, it assumes a heightened legal duty of care. The state becomes, in a meaningful legal sense, responsible for that child’s safety and well-being. When it fails in that responsibility — when it places a child in a dangerous home, ignores reports of abuse, sends a child to an institution where harm is foreseeable, or denies a child the medical and mental health services they need — it may be violating that child’s constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Civil rights claims in child welfare cases are powerful legal tools, and Justice for Kids® has the experience to deploy them effectively. Constitutional violations may arise from a broad range of ODHS conduct, including deliberate indifference to known dangers inside a foster placement, failure to protect a child from foreseeable abuse by a caregiver, unnecessary institutionalization that deprives a child of liberty without adequate justification, excessive or improper use of physical restraints in residential or treatment settings, discrimination against LGBTQ+ youth in placement decisions and service delivery, and denial of disability accommodations that federal law requires.
As an established Portland Oregon child neglect law firm, Justice for Kids® pursues civil rights claims alongside traditional negligence and personal injury claims to build the strongest possible case for each child it represents. When ODHS’s conduct rises to the level of a constitutional violation, civil rights litigation can provide both significant compensation for the child and the kind of institutional accountability that forces systemic change.
Oregon’s child welfare system has operated under legal scrutiny for years. Federal litigation has documented constitutional violations at the systemic level. Justice for Kids® is equipped to pursue those same theories — adapted to the specific facts and circumstances of each individual child’s case — in Oregon’s courts.
Child Injuries in Foster Care: When the System Causes the Harm
Beyond civil rights claims, Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice handles the full range of physical and psychological injury cases that arise when ODHS and its contracted providers fail in their duty of care.
Physical abuse inside foster homes is among the most straightforward — and most devastating — of these cases. When a child is beaten, choked, burned, or subjected to cruel physical punishment by a caregiver that ODHS licensed, placed, and was responsible for supervising, the agency’s liability does not end with the foster parent. ODHS had a duty to screen that caregiver properly, to conduct meaningful background checks, to respond to prior complaints, and to monitor the placement on an ongoing basis. When those duties are breached and a child is injured, Justice for Kids® pursues every avenue of accountability available.
Sexual abuse cases represent a category where Justice for Kids®’ experience and sensitivity are equally essential. Sexual abuse in foster care — by a foster parent, another adult in the home, an older child, or staff at a residential facility — is not uncommon, and ODHS’s failure to prevent it is not always the result of bad luck. Often, there were warning signs. Prior complaints. Background indicators that should have triggered closer scrutiny. Safety planning failures that left a child alone with a known risk. Justice for Kids® investigates each of these factors carefully, building cases that connect the agency’s failures to the specific harm the child suffered.
Psychological and emotional harm — often harder to see and harder to quantify than physical injury — is no less real and no less compensable. Children who are subjected to chronic instability, repeated placement disruption, isolation from siblings and community, and the grinding neglect of a system that treats them as case numbers rather than people suffer injuries that can last a lifetime. As an experienced foster care child neglect law firm, Justice for Kids® works with mental health experts and child development specialists to document and present these harms with the rigor and clarity they deserve.
Advocacy for Oregon’s Most Overlooked Children: Disabilities, Neglect, and the Failure to Serve
Among the populations most consistently failed by Oregon’s child welfare system are children with disabilities — children whose needs are the most complex, whose placement options are the most limited, and whose legal protections are the most extensive and the most routinely ignored.
A child with autism entering Oregon’s foster care system is entitled to a placement that can meet their specific therapeutic, educational, and behavioral needs. They are entitled to continuation of the services, supports, and routines that their development depends on. They are entitled to an IEP that follows them from placement to placement and a caseworker who ensures it is implemented. Oregon law and federal disability statutes make these obligations clear.
What happens in practice is often far removed from what the law requires. Children with significant disabilities are placed in homes or facilities that lack the training and resources to support them. Services are disrupted during transitions. IEPs are ignored because no one is coordinating between ODHS and the school district. Children regress — losing months or years of therapeutic progress — because the adults responsible for their care failed to communicate, plan, or follow through.
Justice for Kids® evaluates these cases with the same thoroughness it brings to every matter: reviewing the full record of services ordered and services delivered, consulting with special education and disability law experts, and building legal arguments that hold ODHS accountable for the specific failures that caused the specific child to be harmed. These cases matter not only for the individual children involved, but for the broader principle that disability should never be a reason for a child to receive less protection, less care, or less legal advocacy.
Adoption Disclosure Negligence: When Agencies Hide the Truth
One of the most important areas of Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice — and one of the least understood by families until they find themselves living it — is adoption disclosure negligence. Oregon’s child welfare agencies have a legal obligation to provide adoptive families with complete, accurate, and honest information about a child’s background, diagnoses, trauma history, and known behavioral patterns before an adoption is finalized.
That obligation is violated with troubling frequency. Families adopt children without being told about diagnoses of reactive attachment disorder, histories of sexualized behavior or aggression, prior failed placements, psychiatric hospitalizations, or documented trauma responses that require intensive professional intervention. They discover the truth not in a pre-adoption disclosure meeting, but in the middle of a crisis — when a younger sibling has been harmed, when an emergency hospitalization reveals a psychiatric history the agency never mentioned, or when a child’s behavior makes clear that the agency’s representations were either incomplete or outright false.
As a seasoned adoption disclosure negligence law firm, Justice for Kids® pursues the full range of claims available to these families: negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, breach of statutory disclosure obligations, and claims for increased adoption subsidies to fund the intensive services the child actually needs. The firm fights not only for financial accountability but for the practical outcome that matters most — keeping families together, getting children into appropriate treatment, and ensuring that adoptive parents have the resources to do what they committed to do when they opened their homes.
When adoption disruptions occur — when families, despite their best efforts and their genuine love, cannot safely maintain a placement without support they were never given — Justice for Kids® pursues claims on behalf of both the family and the child. An adoption disruption is not a failure of the family. It is a failure of the agency that withheld the truth. And it represents yet another devastating loss for a child who has already endured too many.
The Oregon Team: Florida Excellence, Pacific Northwest Commitment
Howard M. Talenfeld, founder of Justice for Kids® and a nationally recognized leader in child welfare law, has spent decades building one of the country’s most effective practices for children harmed by government systems. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org) and brings a national policy perspective to every case the firm pursues. His Florida roots and national reach make him uniquely positioned to lead Justice for Kids®’ expansion into Oregon.
Justin Grosz, Oregon-licensed attorney, Co-Business Unit Leader, and Partner at Justice for Kids®, has tried more than 230 jury cases to verdict and has devoted his career to representing children harmed in foster care, residential programs, and institutional settings. His knowledge of Oregon courts, ODHS processes, and the state’s dependency system makes him an immediately effective advocate for every family that reaches out.
“Florida taught us what it means to fight for children without compromise. We are bringing that same commitment to Oregon — because every child in this state deserves an advocate who will not back down.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Serving Children and Families Statewide
Justice for Kids® represents clients throughout Oregon, including Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and surrounding communities. All consultations are free and confidential. The firm works on a contingency basis — no fees unless the firm recovers on a 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, and institutions responsible for children’s safety. The firm has a proven record of securing significant verdicts, settlements, and systemic reforms on behalf of injured and neglected children nationwide.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Justice for Kids® | Howard M. Talenfeld 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/
