It Was 20 Years Ago Today …

Oregon Super Lawyers magazine arrived on the scene in 2006, and so did the following attorneys, all of whom graduated law school or began practicing around that time. They’ve navigated a tumultuous 20 years: from a global financial meltdown to a worldwide pandemic; from remote depositions to the looming specter of artificial intelligence; from an expansion of marriage rights to concern for the rule of law itself.

We spoke with each of them about where we’ve been and where we might be heading.

Why did you go into the law?

Nicholas A. Kampars, Wildwood Law Group, Business Litigation; Willamette Law: I had done mock trial in high school and enjoyed it. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, and I got to work with the judge for the county and the county attorney. It piqued my interest. 

Jill E. Brittle, Jill Brittle Family Law Group P.C., Family Law; Lewis & Clark Law School: As a teenager, I read a lot of my dad’s novels, which tended toward legal thrillers. It sounded exciting and smart—all the lawyers were problem-solvers who saved the day. When I was in college, I started working at a law firm as a legal secretary and just felt an affinity to it.

Marlene R. Yesquen, Hollander Lebenbaum & Patrick, Personal Injury – General: Plaintiff; Lewis & Clark Law School: I grew up in northern Virginia. Both my parents are Peruvian immigrants. There’s a large Peruvian community there, and the Washington, D.C., area had immigration offices and every kind of federal governmental office. I loved that history. I learned about Congress and the rule of law, and was fascinated with how we all lived by these laws that were created in Washington, D.C. As a young Latin-American child growing up in two cultures, I wanted to make sure that I was included in the formation of these laws, and that others who looked like me and had similar experiences and backgrounds were included in these laws.

Kevin J. Jacoby, Harrang Long, Cannabis Law; Willamette Law: I had kids very early in my life—my oldest was born when I was 20 years old. It was just a function of: How can I position myself to have a career as quickly as possible where I can raise children?

Rebecca Cambreleng, Cambreleng & Marton, Employment Litigation: Plaintiff; American University Washington College of Law: My dad was working for a company that had a classic pension fund, and it was bought out by a large corporation, which dismantled the pension fund and put in place 401(k)s. He lost a lot of money because of it. I was appalled that the company would do that. It was one of my first lessons in the fact that lawyers are the people who can stick up for those who don’t otherwise have a voice.

Why did you choose your practice area?

Cambreleng (Employment Litigation: Plaintiff): It chose me—based on what happened with my father and a really, really good law professor when I was in my J.D. program. ERISA employee benefits was actually what I started with. I did some of that work and then realized I loved the litigation side more than anything else.

Kampars (Business Litigation): That’s all I ever thought I would do—trial work. I liked being in the courtroom, being able to stand up in front of a judge or a jury and represent a client. I liked public speaking. In my mind, that was always what a lawyer was.

Brittle (Family Law): I was drawn to the people aspect of it, and to the challenge that comes with managing the complex emotions that come in. As well as the practical piece of: How are we going to structure a solution?

Jacoby (Cannabis Law): My initial run in administrative law was on behalf of wildland firefighters who had contracts with the state of Oregon. I had some early success there. In 2014, I had a couple of clients come to me wanting to establish medical dispensaries in the state, wanting help going through the approval process. That November was when the ballot measure was passed legalizing recreational marijuana. Following that, primarily in 2016, is when this practice started to ramp up. I was actually involved in the first contested case in Oregon over cannabis licensing.

Yesquen (Personal Injury – General: Plaintiff): My first legal job was with the Center for NonProfit Legal Services in Medford. I found a job in public interest law, and was able to help individuals who were low income with their legal matters. But unfortunately it was not enough to help with student loans. So I found a job with a plaintiff’s firm. They needed work with Social Security disability primarily, even though they did personal injury as well, and workers’ compensation. There was a high need for Social Security attorneys. Those cases allowed me to learn about my community’s and clients’ needs.

How has your practice area changed in the past 20 years? 

Yesquen: When I first started out as a bilingual attorney, I was given no bilingual staff. It was hard to find interpreters. It was challenging. Documents would not be translated for clients who couldn’t read English. Now, I see most offices have some sort of bilingual staff member.

Jacoby: How the cannabis market has matured. A lot of folks entered the market early on, looking to make a lot of money, and have exited. There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry—fewer clients holding about the same number of licenses. And it seems like every year there’s been some sort of major legislative overhaul, some unexpected rule change that has rocked the industry.

Cambreleng: How worker-friendly a lot of blue states have become. There are more and more protections for workers, which has led to much better outcomes for our clients and much more equitable treatment. Paid leave in Oregon has been a big deal, even though there have been kinks in the system. That’s the way we want to go—the way of other countries, where they actually give people time to bond with their children.

Brittle: The trend toward alternative dispute resolution. The area of collaborative practice has really taken off in Portland in the last 10 years. We have a lot more practitioners who are not only trained in that process but practicing in it. It’s a nonlitigation process where the parties sign a contract agreeing that they are going to hire—essentially—settlement lawyers and work together as a team to resolve their divorce. So instead of being on the court timeline, we’re off the court docket. And then the trend toward more equal parity in time. When I started, cases tended to result in moms having primary, physical custody of the children, and the kids saw Dad every other weekend. That was really premised on an old-fashioned view of the father being the wage earner and the mother being a stay-at-home parent. Those roles have continued to change, and the courts are catching up.

Kampars: Cases are settling more. Trials are becoming fewer and fewer, and that’s disappointing to me, because that’s what I like most about my field. I’ve been lucky—I’ve averaged a trial a year—which, to a layperson, doesn’t sound like much. But for a business litigator, it’s a lot. I feel like the newer lawyers are not getting the experience because the cases are resolved. I fear it’s becoming a lost art.

How has the law itself changed in the past 20 years?

Jacoby: Filing everything online gives us more leeway in terms of deadlines. It also makes it easier to see what’s going on in the case.

Cambreleng: I don’t like the direction that the Supreme Court has taken in its rulings, getting rid of stare decisis, getting rid of Roe v. Wade, just undoing years and years of really good work by the court.

Yesquen: When I was considering having children, I would talk to every female attorney that I came into contact with—and there weren’t that many at the time—and most of them would tell me that they went part time as soon as they had children. And I just thought, “Wow, I can’t do that. I have bills and I have to pay back my student loans.” … Ever since I was little, I believed that, just as men have their careers and their families, I should be able to have both as well. Now, there are more women who are having their families and their careers, juggling both. We all help each other. We stay motivated and learn from one another.

Brittle: The changes allowing same-sex marriages—allowing those rights to accrue to groups that previously didn’t have them. There are very distinct differences between what rights you have in a domestic partnership versus what rights you have in a marriage. Also, what has really impacted and opened up options in the family law field for other people is that our courts locally are focused on access to justice for underrepresented counties. So the recent change to allow paralegals to get a license in Oregon—it’s a new program that’s only been around for a year or so.

Kampars: Since COVID, the technology in terms of remote appearances has certainly impacted how lawyers practice—for better and for worse. I think it’s become a lot more efficient to attend court hearings or other meetings, depositions, remotely. And you have the flexibility to work and not have to commute. You save your clients the cost of having to travel and be there in person. But as a litigator, you also lose the interpersonal connection of meeting your opposing counsel, and chatting with them in the 10 minutes before the judge takes the bench at a hearing. Or on the breaks in the deposition, maybe you get to know your client better. It’s those kinds of interpersonal connections that have been lost and negatively impacted by that technology. 

What is your most memorable case? 

Jacoby: A federal receivership initiated by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a company that owned and operated retirement communities throughout the country. It was based out of Salem, Oregon, where I graduated law school. I represented hundreds of investors.

Cambreleng: I had a 32-year-old client who was diagnosed with cancer while working for a large fashion chain. The company had been basically scaring any employee who got cancer and was going through chemo—forcing them to sign these severance agreements, then telling them that they’d been laid off. … Opposing counsel was horrible, but I had a judge who understood what was going on and who worked really hard to protect my client. At the end of the day, I won, I got a great outcome for my client, and we hoped that it was a deterrent to the practice.

Kampars: I remember a case we had in 2015 in Clackamas County. I was representing an individual in a closely held business dispute. It was a trial in the middle of the summer, a two-week trial, which is always hard. We had a great firm on the other side, Markowitz Herbold. Every day you had peaks and valleys—feeling so confident in your case one day and then being totally decimated the next by an answer the witness gave. … It stands out in my mind as one of those experiences as a midlevel young partner where you cut your teeth and really get into the trial practice.

Brittle: There’s a case that I did with my former partner, we took it to the Court of Appeals, and then went to the Oregon Supreme Court, and we won at all three levels. The key issue was a family business, and the question was whether the husband’s family had gifted him this business or if the married couple had actually purchased it, and to what extent had they commingled their personal life with this business. And have they commingled it to such an extent that the court should treat it as a joint asset and that it should be equitably distributed between the parties? We prevailed on where the court said: We think this is an asset that should be equally divided between the parties.

Yesquen: I have one case that I think back to quite regularly. It was a homeless individual, a Spanish-speaking individual, who was on the sidewalk and was run over by a drunk driver. A colleague and I took the case and represented him. It turned out that the drunk driver was overserved at a nearby bar that was well known in the community for overserving. And so we were able to get him money for his damages. … Here’s somebody who was homeless, who wasn’t communicating on a regular basis with other humans. … He would come to my office regularly to chat. I saw how important it was to connect with people—more than just the legal aspect. It reminds me, always, “There’s a human being here.”

What are your concerns for the future?

Jacoby: The advent of AI. I keep seeing a bunch of firms getting in trouble for using AI for legal research. And I’m having to deal with some clients who are using AI for legal research and coming up with entirely fabricated citations. 

Kampars: The waning role of the jury trial is concerning. I think it’s fueled by two things: Fewer businesses want to take the risk of going to a jury trial, and alternative forms of resolution, like arbitration, which are private and usually handled by a lawyer or judge, can serve a great purpose. At times they can be cost-effective. But as a profession, we’re losing the ability to learn from those private decisions. They aren’t published, they aren’t challenged in the appeals courts, it’s totally private. You lose the transparency of the process.

Cambreleng: The stripping of protections for the most vulnerable in our society. You look at trans rights, you look at women’s rights, you look at LGBTQ rights, all of those are all being trampled on, as well as workers’ rights. And just the rule of law in general. We’re in a really precarious system. We’re rooted in the idea that at the end of the day, the law is the law, and everybody mutually agrees to follow it. And if you break that law, you pay the consequences. And if the executive branch no longer follows the law, I think a lot of people are going to follow suit. You’re going to have judgments against companies who say: Try and get that money from me.

Brittle: I get concerned about the level of the adversarial component of family law. I think maybe this is true for all practice areas, but I think it’s especially important in family law that the lawyers maintain a high degree of professionalism. … There are a lot of patterns in our world right now that are very us-and-them.

Yesquen: The Trump administration is challenging all sorts of federal rules and regulations and policies. There are a lot of complaints being filed with regard to the administration’s actions in an attempt to safeguard what some believe are our rights, which are owed us under the law and should be protected. … Many countries, they don’t have a civil system to take somebody to court if you get into a car crash and you’re hurt. In some countries, people will just get out of the car and pay up at that moment—or fight each other, take justice into their own hands. In this country, we have a legal system. So far, it’s allowed our society to function.

What are your hopes? 

Kampars: The Oregon Bar, ever since I joined, is one of the more collegial bars. It is a decent and humane place to practice law. 

Cambreleng: I think what we’re seeing is everybody waking up and seeing that they’ve been lulled into this idea that corporations are people and corporations have rights, and corporations are there for the best interest. It’s going to get loud, it’s going to get bad. But my hope and my belief is that this pendulum is coming back in the direction we’ve had for so many years of progress and so many years of civil rights and so many years of the court and society doing essentially the right thing—caring about things like diversity and equity and inclusion in the workplace, in daily life. 

Brittle: I’m seeing law students coming out of law school much more interested in alternative dispute resolution. Being much more creative, much less interested in the old structures and hierarchy. The sort of “I’m going to grind it out as an associate trainee for seven years with the hope of partnership”—I’m seeing a lot more young lawyers go out on their own and go straight into mediation practice. All those things benefit our community.

Yesquen: With so many friends, we talk about how AI is going to take over all sorts of things. What professions are our children going to do in the future? Will lawyers have a place in society? I’m very hopeful. I don’t fear that lawyers will no longer be needed. The job may change, but I feel like you’ll always need someone. You’ll need advocates in the community and in the world.