About the practice
Built for the worst month of your year
Harbor started in 2013 with one lawyer, one room on Clinton Street and a fairly simple observation about which clients came out of a divorce well.
The clients who came out of a divorce well were almost never the ones with the most aggressive lawyer. They were the ones who understood what was happening to them.
Renata spent eleven years at a large Portland litigation firm before that. It was good work and she was good at it, but the structure of the place made two things nearly impossible: telling a client that the motion they wanted was a bad idea, and telling them what the whole thing was going to cost.
Both of those are commercial decisions rather than legal ones, and both of them are the difference between a client who feels held and a client who feels processed. So Harbor was set up small enough that they could be the default.
What small actually buys you
Three attorneys and one client care manager, sixty to seventy open matters at a time, and a Monday morning where every one of them is discussed by all four of us. That is the whole firm. It is not a growth plan.
What it buys is specific. You get one named attorney from the first call to the closing letter. You get an answer within a working day. You get a status note on the first Monday of every month even when nothing has happened, because silence is what frightens people. And when we are full, we say we are full and refer you on rather than taking a retainer and getting to you in six weeks.
The part about money
Family law has an uncomfortable structure: the lawyer is paid by the hour and the fight is what generates hours. We are not going to pretend that tension does not exist. What we do about it is put the numbers in front of you constantly. A written range at the start. A re-forecast every month. A flat fee wherever the work is predictable enough to justify one.
And a habit of saying, out loud, when the thing you are asking us to do will cost four thousand dollars and change nothing. We have talked more clients out of filings than any of us can count, and it is the part of the job we are most proud of.
Where we sit
A 1912 house on Clinton Street in Southeast Portland, ground floor, with armchairs instead of a conference table and a corner of the room with books in it. We appear regularly in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington County, and we take matters across most of northwest Oregon. Renata is also admitted in Washington.
You can also do the entire thing over video if crossing town is the barrier, and a real number of our clients do.
Three rules we actually keep
Say the hard thing early
If your case is weak, if the filing you want will not help, if the settlement on the table is better than what a trial would likely produce, you hear it from us the week we know it, not the month before trial.
Price like a person, not a meter
Flat fees where a flat fee is fair. Written ranges where it genuinely depends on the other side. Scheduling questions are free, and we re-forecast the estimate every month rather than once at the start.
Protect the after
Almost every client will still have to speak to the other person at a graduation in fifteen years. We build for that version of your life, not for the version where winning the argument is the point.
Where we give our time
Each attorney here carries two pro bono matters at a time through the Multnomah County courthouse self-help programme, and Desmond volunteers monthly with a legal clinic for foster families. Mei sits on the Oregon State Bar elder law section's education committee.
We mention it not as a credential but because it is a real constraint on our capacity, and it is part of why we sometimes tell you we are full.
Meet the four of usStart with a conversation, not a commitment
Twenty minutes on the phone, free, with somebody who will tell you plainly whether you even need a lawyer for this.