Carol will be presented with the Taxation Section Award of Merit on June 4, 2026, at the Oregon Tax Institute.
Carol was born and raised in small towns and rural communities – Circleville, Ohio, and the Willamette Valley – which gave her appreciation for the issues faced by small businesses and farming communities. After graduating from Linfield College with a dual major in psychology and accounting, she worked for the Oregon Department of Revenue for 10 years as senior tax auditor, abusive tax shelter specialist and hearings officer. Her tenure as a hearings officer gave rise to her desire to become a lawyer.
While attending Lewis and Clark Law School, she clerked at Davis Wright Tremaine and became a DWT associate after graduation. At that time, the firm was looking to build a state and local tax practice in the firm’s Portland office, and she fit the bill.
Jim Judson, a prominent Seattle based SALT lawyer and the firm’s SALT chair, integrated Carol into the firm’s SALT group, where she learned about state and local taxes from a private practice perspective. Jim also connected her with other prominent SALT lawyers across the country. While she enjoyed drafting tax opinions and other transactional work, she gravitated toward tax litigation. Through mentoring by Jim and Carmen Santa Maria, Carol developed her tax litigation skills.
While at DWT, Carol worked on large and very interesting state tax cases with top lawyers in the SALT arena, primarily as local counsel. For example, she teamed up with Paul Frankel, Morrison and Foerster, in a case involving the state sourcing of income derived from a tortious interference jury verdict award to Pennzoil from Texaco (which has a fascinating back story).
But her passion has always been to help folks that cannot afford big firm billing rates. When Carol decided she could not be both an excellent mother and excellent lawyer while working full-time at the firm, she took the leap and started her own firm in 2002, Carol Vogt Lavine, LLC, as a solo practitioner. Since then, her local counsel tax practice has grown and helps keep the lights on while allowing her to help individuals, small businesses, and small farms. In 2009, she successfully lobbied Oregon lawmakers to amend the farm use special assessment statutes to permit farmers in non-EFU zones to conduct extensive remediation needed to return the land to farming without losing their special assessment status.
After Bush v. Gore in 2000, Carol became interested in election integrity. She volunteered as an election observer for the next 3 presidential elections, which led her to have absolute confidence in Oregon’s mail-in ballot system.
Carol loves sports – playing, coaching, and watching her favorite teams. After her children graduated from high school, she missed “connecting with” school age kids. Since then, she has helped in classrooms and been a “lunch buddy” for children in high risk living situations for 12 years and continues today. She has been an advocate for people with family members with mental illnesses for over 30 years.
Carol – “Material wealth has never been particularly important to me. The practice of law has presented me with so many opportunities, has allowed me to live comfortably and, importantly, to do for others. I look forward to spending retirement with my husband of 35 years, our kids and extended family, the date TBD. Stay tuned.”
