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Last year, a board overseeing a major Multnomah County health care operation got new lawyers. Its chosen firm, Rational Unicorn Legal Services, touted a mission to help regular people operate modest down-home enterprises such as small businesses and nonprofits. “Legal representation with a touch of whimsy,” one tagline went.
Owner and manager Lindy Laurence said in one marketing document that the firm stands as “proof that it’s possible to provide our clients with great counsel and advice in ways that surprise and delight.”
Rational Unicorn’s newest client was an outlier. Though the little-known Multnomah County Community Health Center Board was, in line with federal statute, largely composed of everyday people, it was a significant institution. The board is tasked with hiring the executive director and approving strategic priorities and a $200 million-plus taxpayer funded budget for a major network of federally regulated health clinics that serve tens of thousands of lower-income Portlanders.
Also, the year ahead would not be so delightful. As WW has reported, the board has seen several recent impeachments, and county staffers who interacted closely with it have lost their jobs. In recent months, a former executive director, a onetime board member and an ex-employee filed separate notices with the county that could be preludes to lawsuits.
In 2026, the county says, it has paid Rational Unicorn at least $125,000—a major bump in legal expenses over previous years, in which it paid no legal counsel for the board more than $20,000. And the law firm’s work has come under public scrutiny. In a Sept. 11 hearing on a narrow issue—whether a specific May gathering of the board violated public meetings law—members of the Oregon Government Ethics Commission were startled to hear that Rational Unicorn had blessed the gathering in question as perfectly legal.
One ethics commissioner wanted to make sure he’d heard right: “This was on advice from your legal counsel?“ Another said, “I’m very concerned about this advice.”
WW published a story Sept. 28 on the ethics probe. On Oct. 2, Rational Unicorn and the board parted ways.
“Pursuant to the Oregon and Washington Rules of Professional Conduct,” Laurence told the board in an email, according to the county, “Rational Unicorn Legal Services, PC must withdraw from further representation of the Community Health Center Board.” It is unclear why she stepped down.
What has not been previously reported through all of this heartburn is Laurence’s unusual past—which would stand out even for someone who wasn’t charging a county operation $525 an hour to handle sensitive, contested legal affairs.
Nearly two decades ago, when Laurence had a different last name from a previous marriage, prosecutors charged her with stealing more than $1.6 million from her Washington state employer—a case one prosecutor would go on to call “one of the largest embezzlement cases in Pierce County history.”
Laurence pleaded guilty to 27 counts of theft and three of money laundering. After prison came law school. In 2023, a court vacated her felony convictions, allowing her to put her law license to more robust use—and to tell prospective employers she’d never been convicted of the crimes.
Indeed, few appear to have known anything about this past at all. Though Laurence says she told the Washington State Bar Association about her history, there is no evidence she advised board or county officials of her backstory when she signed on as a contractor last year.
Early this month, WW, having reviewed old court documents, asked Laurence to discuss this story. Through a spokesperson, she declined an interview and sent a brief statement. “I have written my own account of these events here,” she wrote, linking to a page on Rational Unicorn’s website. She did not respond to a question about when she had first published this account, including after a reporter pointed out metadata suggesting the webpage had gone live just hours before.
Laurence presents the essay as an occasion to move past shame, to acknowledge and transcend the past on her own terms. “In someone else’s hands, for someone else’s purposes, a story like mine causes a kind of damage that is difficult to undo,” she wrote. “So I am choosing to tell it myself.”
In 2004, Lindy Laurence was Lindy Robertson. She worked as an executive assistant to James Sweeney, president of Milgard Manufacturing, a door and window maker in the Tacoma suburb of Fife. One part of her job: processing and reconciling corporate charge accounts.
Robertson, who’d joined the company a year earlier, was 24, with a toddler and a husband chronically out of work, she later wrote, trying to support a family and “living a life that did not feel chosen by me.” Beginning in mid-2004, she would later acknowledge in court, she started using her employer’s credit account to her own personal ends, and for more than two and a half years she did not stop.
An investigation found that some of the funds stolen from the corporate American Express account went straight to retail: Amazon, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma.
But much of it took a more elaborate route. According to an indictment, Robertson transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to PayPal accounts in her name, and from there onward to her and her husband’s bank account. Investigators alleged the money helped pay for property taxes, a remodel, mortgage payments, two cars, a future college tuition account. They alleged Robertson diverted other Milgard funds to a charitable organization run by her father, for whom she also funded two 2006 flights to Uganda at a total price of $26,000.
The unauthorized purchases grew month over month, prosecutors said. Where in December 2004, investigators found, Robertson racked up $45,000 in unauthorized charges, in October 2006 she diverted $212,000.
The ruse did not last. In February 2007, a month when Robertson’s unauthorized charges tallied a relatively low $27,000, American Express reported some suspicious transactions to Milgard. The company began an internal investigation, identifying “approximately $1,619,192” that she had improperly diverted for personal use.
At times, investigators found, she forged Sweeney’s signature. In other instances, the boss seemed to bless the transactions explicitly—until later, investigators say, they traced these approvals to Robertson’s computer, where she had access to his email account.
In March 2007, the company sued, and a Milgard attorney contacted the Washington State Patrol.
Looking back, Laurence recalls telling herself she was building security for her family. “I knew what I was doing,” she writes, “and I did not stop.” She says this past remains a matter of great shame—she destroyed trust that had been freely given, wrecked her reputation, and cannot undo the harm she caused—yet she is proud of the life she has since built, “one honest day at a time. That pride does not erase the shame, nor should it. Both are part of my story.”
She says she paid back everything she stole—a figure she describes as “more than $1.2 million”—and more, and the judge gave her four years and nine months in prison. She recalls asking if she could kiss her children goodbye, being told no, watching them be carried from the courtroom. “That is the memory that still finds me at three in the morning,” she writes, “and I think it should.”
She got out of prison early under a new state law for incarcerated parents. After a divorce, she became Lindy Laurence. She says she told the University of Washington everything and got a full scholarship. Washington State Bar records show she was admitted April 27, 2021, but she says her criminal history made it hard to get a job.
After the 2023 video hearing in which the court vacated her conviction, she recalls, there was no courthouse to walk out of. Instead, she says, she closed her laptop and sat at her kitchen table for a long while.
Laurence joined Rational Unicorn Legal Services that year, and bought the firm the next. She speaks fondly of her little team, who she says has known her story far longer than the public. Together, she and Rational Unicorn’s lone Oregon licensed attorney have appeared across the local media circuits, promoting, in folksy plain language, best practices for running or acquiring a small business of one’s dreams. In 2024, 2025 and 2026, Rational Unicorn won Willamette Week’s Best of Portland Readers’ Poll for best law firm in town.
A county spokesperson says it “has no record of Laurence having disclosed the 2007 conviction to the county during the contracting process.”
Still, the county defends its vetting; consistent with normal process, it says it verified that the contractor was registered to do business in Oregon, was not on the federal debarred list, and was appropriately insured.
Before Rational Unicorn’s contract with the board began, the county spokesperson notes, “the Washington State Bar had seen fit to license Laurence for years.” The spokesperson adds that, under Washington law, a crime being vacated means, “for all purposes, including responding to questions on employment applications, an offender whose conviction has been vacated may state that the offender has never been convicted of that crime.”
Multnomah County Community Health Center Board chair Darrell Wade did not respond to a request for comment. His predecessor as board chair, Brenda Chambers, tells WW that Laurence failed to support her, acted unprofessionally—“I’d never heard an attorney yell at people like that in a meeting”—and conspired with Wade and other board members to impeach her on trumped-up accusations earlier this year.
Still, she says she knew nothing of Laurence’s criminal past. Neither did her predecessor Tamia Deary, the board chair who hired Laurence. Deary, however, says even if she had known, she’d have hired her all the same. Having now read Laurence’s account, she feels the attorney went through a legitimate process of getting her life back on track. “The way that she showed up for me, it makes so much sense,” Deary says. “She’s living her values in a way that I don’t think everyone does.”
Deary says she felt the past board counsel was too much on the county’s side, rather than the board’s. She largely wanted Rational Unicorn’s help developing a nonprofit, Welcome Health, that would insulate the clinic network’s budget, branding and operations from the county government. But Deary did not last long enough to see this through.
As The Oregonian reported last year, an outside investigation substantiated county staffer complaints that Deary had bullied them, and a leader at a public employee union called for her resignation. Deary, who regards the external probe as having been incomplete and unjust, regrets that the board’s ongoing tumult has splashed against Laurence. Still, she adds, “I think that it’s good that this forced Lindy to be forthcoming. Because I can’t imagine what it felt like to carry that weight.”
