Essent Law

The name “Essent Law” reminds the firm’s agents of what, at bottom, a law firm really does and what it really ought to offer.
In the end, a law firm doesn’t provide mere legal services. It provides something much more important, sought by our clients, and essential. In the end, clients don’t hire attorneys to, say, draft a motion for summary judgment. They pay to have their business vindicated from a problem employee or to defend their brand and reputation.
The fact is that in our society enjoying access to good legal counsel and advocacy is necessary to realize our full rights, citizenship, and place in society, which is governed by the rule of law. Without it, we are de facto second-class citizens. In this very real way, the services we offer are essential to a full, good life. Relatedly, businesses cannot compete and operate optimally without great legal counsel who “gets” the client’s business.
Timothy LaBadie was born in Eugene, Oregon to middle-class parents. When he was five, his family moved to Denver, Colorado to get help for his sister, Erin, who suffers from a chronic form of epilepsy. His sister’s health problems and the family’s ensuing not-so-easy years growing up in inner-city Denver was a big reason he eventually decided to become an advocate and attorney and instilled in him a love of the underdog and the misfit.
After high school, Tim dropped out of college at the end of his first semester, worked for a summer in Grand Teton National Park, then worked as a deckhand on a boat that sailed from British Columbia to Baja, Mexico, and he eventually moved back to the Pacific Northwest. At age 22, he was laid off from Weyerhaeuser when some of their Portland-area operations were outsourced to China. From this, he got another chance to start attending college through the NAFTA retraining program, even though college didn’t interest him much at the time.
Tim ended up earning his Bachelors of Arts in Economics degree at Portland State University in 2008, with a focus on Philosophy and Latin. During this time, he volunteered as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), where he worked with (or sometimes in opposition to, if necessary) social workers, and various medical and legal professionals to advocate for the best interest of children. He supported himself through college by working in the mailroom at Portland’s largest law firm, Stoel Rives.
Tim secured a near full-ride scholarship to Willamette University College of Law in 2008 after having placed in the top 13% in the national Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). And he started attending Atkinson Graduate School of Management in 2009, also on a substantial scholarship. In law school he focused on criminal law, business law, and technology law. His MBA studies focused on startups, entrepreneurship, organizational design, and competitive intelligence.
During law and business school, he authored several reports that melded his law school and MBA training and experiece: a report on the changing nature of the legal industry and law practice, a competitive-intelligence report recommending how Charter Schools can compete and perform better in Oregon, and a report recommending how law schools can improve through using novel technology.
Also during law school, Tim worked for a talented group of litigators at a boutique firm, Harris, Wyatt & Amala, which fouced on civil litigation (personal injury, insurance defense, wrongful death, products liability, etc.) and criminal defense.
After graduating law school and Willamette’s MBA program and passing the bar in the fall of 2012, Tim founded Essent Law because of deep structural changes taking place in the legal industry and profession.