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In a tumultuous recent few months full of internal feuds and impeachments, the board overseeing Multnomah County’s vast network of community clinics—and its $200 million-plus budget—has needed plenty of legal advice.
It’s gotten it from Lindy Laurence. She has spoken up at board meetings. She’s sent a lengthy legal memo. When the board impeached, or tried to impeach, certain of its members, she gave pointed counsel on the process.
According to the county, the public board has paid her firm, Rational Unicorn Legal Services, at least $127,877 for that work.
Lately, though, ethics watchdogs have raised concerns about the quality of the advice the Washington state lawyer has given the board about Oregon Public Meetings Law.
The matter, under review by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, concerns a tiny slice of a saga that has embroiled leaders of the Multnomah County Community Health Center—a web of clinics and other health care operations providing medical, pharmacy and dental services to tens of thousands of people per year.
The board has gone through several impeachments this year, and county staffers who interacted closely with it have lost their jobs. Accusations of power struggles, sabotage, and discrimination have flown—including in recent weeks as a former board member and county staffer each filed notices with the county that could be preludes to a lawsuit.
But the ethics commission’s inquiry has been focused on a specific meeting, held May 20, in which Community Health Center board members removed one of their own and formalized plans to impeach another.
The question before OGEC is whether that meeting violated Oregon Public Meetings Law. At the ethics commission’s Sept. 11 meeting, OGEC staff investigator Daniel Pacheco presented his preliminary findings: that, among other concerns, the meeting was convened in private, without advance notice to the public, and without making available electronic means by which the public could observe the meeting. Pacheco noted those are all potential violations of state law.
Having been hauled before the ethics commission, two respondents, both Multnomah County Community Health Center board members at the time, testified that, in attending the May 20 meeting, they’d been following advice.
“We’re a volunteer, patient-majority board,” said one former board member, Dani Slyman. “We followed legal counsel’s written and expressed direction on this matter to, in good faith, fulfill public meeting law.”
Some OGEC members were struck by this. Why, asked commissioner Larry Givens, was the meeting not publicly noticed?
Multnomah County Community Health Center board chair Darrell Wade responded that when a board was considering the dismissal or disciplinary action of a staff or board member or public official, the meeting doesn’t get publicly noticed or accessed.
Commissioner Givens then asked: “This was on advice from your legal counsel?“
“Yes,” Wade responded.
There was a pause. “I’m very concerned about this advice,” said OGEC vice chair Jonathan Thompson.
Wade responded that the meeting was an executive session, to which Thompson said yes—and executive sessions have to be publicly noticed.
“I have no doubt that you followed the advice of your legal counsel, which is what you should do,” Thompson said. “What I’m concerned about in this case is the advice that you seem to have gotten from your legal counsel.”
OGEC chair Shenoa Payne said she shared these concerns. “I sympathize with respondents,” she said. “They followed legal advice that was incorrect.”
The commission voted unanimously to launch an investigation.
One document they are likely to review is a May 18 email that Laurence the lawyer sent to Multnomah County Community Health Center board members, arguing the planned meeting would not be subject to Oregon Public Meetings Law at all.
“The strongest legal position,” Laurence wrote in the email, reviewed by WW, “is that [Community Health Center Board] Executive Committee meetings are not subject to Oregon Public Meetings Law when the Executive Committee is addressing internal Board governance matters that do not involve Health Center policy or administration.” She attached an 11-page memo that laid out this legal case.
The memo is addressed from Nicole Hetz, a Rational Unicorn lawyer with an Oregon license, and Laurence, who does not have an Oregon license.
Whether Laurence should be offering legal advice across state lines at all is a question on which Multnomah County Health Department leadership, which distances itself from the health center’s mostly federally governed (and funded) oversight board, declines to opine.
The county press office tells WW the health center board can retain outside legal counsel and is responsible for ensuring that counsel meets ethical and legal requirements. Whether that is the case here, a spokesperson said, is a question for the board, the legal counsel or the Oregon State Bar.
Reached by phone, Wade, the board chair, declined to comment.
Laurence, for her part, tells WW that professional responsibility rules prevent her from commenting because the matter involves legal advice to a client and a proceeding before the ethics commission.
Later, a spokesperson sent WW a statement. “Lindy Laurence,” it said, “is licensed to practice law in Washington, and her application for admission to the Oregon State Bar is pending.”
The statement added, “Legal work for the Board has been performed in association with Oregon-licensed counsel, as Oregon’s rules of professional conduct provide.”
The Oregon State Bar says it can’t comment on a matter that could come before it, but says Laurence did have a temporary practice license in Oregon for one year; it expired Nov. 21, 2025.
