{"id":4952,"date":"2025-07-22T08:20:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T15:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bullivant.com\/?p=4952"},"modified":"2025-08-06T16:50:57","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T23:50:57","slug":"vanessa-aaron-profiled-in-super-lawyers-magazine-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/vanessa-aaron-profiled-in-super-lawyers-magazine-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanessa Aaron Profiled in Super Lawyers Magazine 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]This article, written by Jim Walsh, originally appeared in the Oregon 2025 issue of Super Lawyers Magazine. The full issue can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n
\n

Serenity Now<\/h3>\n

Before launching a career in aviation law, Vanessa G. Aaron sailed the world\u00a0 <\/em>| Jim Walsh<\/p>\n

During the COVID pandemic, Vanessa G. Aaron and husband Ed took social distancing to new lengths. For two years, beginning in September 2020, they sailed their boat, Serenity, up and down the Eastern Seaboard and into the Caribbean. \u201cI love new experiences. I love new adventures. I am a constant learner and a very curious person,\u201d says Aaron, now an associate at Bullivant Houser in Portland. \u201cI will look at things like, \u2018I wonder what it\u2019s like to do that?\u2019\u201d Aaron had graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School that chaotic year; but it wasn\u2019t just COVID that sent her to sea. \u201cWe\u2019d just lost a dear friend of ours in a glider accident,\u201d says Aaron, a longtime sailplane pilot. \u201cWhere we were flying was very, very remote, so the group of us were left to literally pick up all of the pieces. \u2026 It took a while to come to grips with that. There were just a lot of reminders where we were at that point in our life of needing to hit the reset button.\u201d Newly empty nesters\u2014both had children from previous marriages\u2014the couple sold most everything they owned before setting sail so they wouldn\u2019t be tempted to return to their old lives. That included their old boat, Free Time, as they went shopping for one that would accommodate their plans. They found it in Florida, and renamed it Serenity\u2014 after the memorable \u201cSerenity now!\u201d mantra on Seinfeld.<\/p>\n

She kept a blog during the voyage. \u201cThe worst piece of equipment you can have on a boat is a calendar,\u201d she wrote. A post from a year into the journey mentioned: \u201cMy favorite benefit from cruising so far has been the people we\u2019ve met and the friends we\u2019ve made along the way. Our \u2018neighborhood\u2019 is essentially the whole of Earth as we sailors meander across her oceans. The sailing life seems to attract a certain personality, and it is a personality that Ed and I gel with very well. \u201cOh, I definitely miss it,\u201d she says now. \u201cI am so extraordinarily thankful that I got the opportunity to have that experience.\u201d Aaron spent plenty of time in the air before taking to the sea. She was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Air Force, while earning her pilot license, then continued working as an air-traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration. Eventually she felt she needed a change, and it was her husband who suggested the law. \u201cBecause you\u2019re good at arguing with people,\u201d he told her. She adds, \u201cBut I think he just wanted me to go argue with people other than him.\u201d She wound up in aviation law. \u201cThat\u2019s what I know,\u201d Aaron says, \u201cthat\u2019s what I\u2019m passionate about. Right now I have a couple of cases involving aircraft accidents. Thankfully, those don\u2019t come up a lot. Despite recent events, aviation is still the safest mode of travel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aviation law is, ironically, preventing her from flying more herself. \u201cI would love to have more time to do it,\u201d she says, but \u201cI can\u2019t just drop everything for two weeks and go do something different, have some different experiences, have some different scenery. And the really difficult thing with being a litigator is you never can totally unplug. There\u2019s always something happening where people need to be able to reach you.\u201d As for the latest project with her husband? It\u2019s a little more stationary than the previous. \u201cWe\u2019ve been building a house and we\u2019re almost done with that,\u201d says Aaron. \u201cWe literally did it from the ground up. We\u2019re both project DIY-types, and we\u2019re both handy. Maybe when we\u2019re done with the house, we\u2019ll get back to sailing. Since we live right on the Willamette River, we\u2019ve got plenty of places to go to by boat. I\u2019m sure the itch will show up again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Vanessa Aaron<\/strong> is an associate in the firm\u2019s Litigation Group who focuses on aviation, personal injury litigation, and product liability matters. Prior to her legal career, Vanessa was an Air Traffic Controller for the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force. She is a commercial pilot, flight instructor, and teaches FAA regulations to new pilots, so she understands how to navigate complex regulatory systems and attain positive outcomes for her clients. Vanessa was selected<\/a> as a Rising Star in Oregon by Super Lawyers in 2025.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=””]This article, written by Jim Walsh, originally appeared in the Oregon 2025 issue of Super Lawyers Magazine. The full issue can be found here. Serenity Now Before launching a career in aviation law, Vanessa G. Aaron sailed the world\u00a0 | Jim Walsh During the COVID pandemic, Vanessa G. Aaron and husband Ed took social…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":829,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[391,151,156],"tags":[197],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-4952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aviation","category-personal-catastrophic-injury-litigation","category-transportation","tag-news","authorormentioned-vanessa-aaron","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4952"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studioactiv8.com\/bullivant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=4952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}