Reviews

Christine is a very effective special education lawyer. Our IEP journey was frustrating, to say the least. Our son’s education was floundering, and we were dealing with a school district that seemed unable to understand what he needed for support. Our first lawyer finally got the school district to agree to an IEP for our son. This IEP, however, contained no meaningful support for him. Our second lawyer persuaded us to compromise to a revised IEP that had some structure but lacked substance. We will spare you the details, but the school district appeared willing to let our son’s education free fall. Then, we found Christine. She told us what we needed to do and how we could convince the school district to provide much needed help for our son’s education. The IEP finally spelled out the support structure our son needed. He just graduated from a high school. The only reason our son has a high school diploma is because of his IEP, which we would not have gotten without Christine.

During our family's time of need Christine provided compassionate, honest, and dedicated advocacy for us. We had never before been involved in a legal dispute and we had no idea of how to go about having our case be heard. Christine was very communicative about the process and readily answered our questions about what was going to take place. We can't say enough about the guidance and protection Christine provided for us while we were engaged in our suit. Ultimately, we prevailed but this became secondary throughout the process as we truly felt heard and advocated for by Christine. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts, Christine, for your belief in us and your rock-solid representation of our case!

I was referred to Christine by our family law attorney. I worked with her and her team for over a year and she was fantastic from beginning to end. She's very easy to talk to and explains things in ways that I understand. She returns messages promptly and responds thoroughly to my inquiries. She's very upbeat, honest and has been a pleasure to work with. We unfortunately found ourselves having to go in front of a judge due to having received an objection to our filing. She and her team did a phenomenal job of making sure that I was prepared and feeling comfortable and confident; which wasn't difficult as I have great faith in these folks after having worked with them for months. We came out the other side with everything that we'd asked for. I'll be working with Christine in the future on our estate planning and on creating a special needs trust for our son and I'm very much looking forward to it. I highly recommend Alderwood Legal.

Based on our nearly 2 year experience working with Ms. Furrer, we found that Ms. Furrer lacked the understanding and knowledge to adequately provide legal counsel regarding complex secondary education concerns and especially during critical times. We believe that her inexperience caused unnecessary time delays in our case and for some very critical issues that still to this day require the attention of authorities and demand remediation. We often raised questions about the timing of activities that required completion and raised concerns about statutory clocks. Ms. Furrer would often respond to our inquiries in a condescending manor and in some instances did not follow through on some tasks that she claimed she could provide legal assistance. Actually, it's our view that some of the problems we took to her grew in severity under her consultation and we believe that to be due to inadequate guidance and inaction on her part as events unfolded real-time. We do not recommend hiring her for any complex secondary education concerns or any issues with special education in the secondary school setting that involve education records maintained by Service Districts or Districts related secondary education, special education, and especially discipline matters, grades, or evidence of record manipulation, if you need the result to be timely, equitable, and in your child's favor. Update: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2022/05/25/oregon-leaders-need-to-stop-disrupting-education-reforms-report-find/ "Gaps in data were also identified as a major systemic issue." https://oregonlive.com/education/2022/07/hundreds-of-oregons-disabled-students-are-illegally-denied-full-school-days-new-report-finds.html

Christine was super attentive, a great communicator. She helped navigate our issue and explain all the different routes we could go and had great follow-through on the direction we went. She got to work right away and we really couldn't be happier!