June, 2011
Laura Orr
June 2011 Archives — Oregon Legal Research Blog
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Oregon Legal Research Blog
New Law Library Website

We at the Washington County Law Library are pleased to announce the premiere of our newly redesigned website. We’ve reorganized our content and added some new navigation menus. A new navigation tab has been added for CLE information, and we organized our legal research resources into subject-area subsites (general resources, Oregon resources, subject guides, etc.). We’ve also added direct links from our home page to the library catalog and the subject guides page. One of the most exciting additions to the website (at least to us) is the document index, where we have compiled all of the documents available on the website. Another exciting new subsite is the Divorce/Family Law page, accessible through both our website and the county’s homepage (from the Key Services & Information menu). We invite you to explore the redesigned site and discover all our library has to offer.

Tagged: divorce and family law

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New Legal Research Guide – Collecting Judgments

Back in March, OregonLive.com ran a David vs. Goliath story on a man from Philadelphia who “foreclosed” on a Wells Fargo Home Mortgage branch. The man didn’t actually foreclose on the branch; he won a judgment against Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, resulting in a lien that would have led to a Sheriff’s sale of the branch’s contents. Judgment collection situations aren’t always that interesting, but we do get quite a few questions about judgments and how to actually collect on them. So, we recently added a new legal research guide on collecting judgments to the law library’s website.

For information on setting up a debt-collection business in Oregon, see Laura’s post from January 4, 2009.

Tagged: collecting judgments

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Hot Coffee, the Movie: A Documentary Film

Hot Coffee, the movie, a documentary film by Oregon attorney, Susan Saladoff:

Excerpt from Hot Coffee webpage: “…Is Justice Being Served?

Seinfeld mocked it. Letterman ranked it in his top ten list. And more than fifteen years later, its infamy continues. Everyone knows the McDonald’s coffee case. It has been routinely cited as an example of how citizens have taken advantage of America’s legal system, but is that a fair rendition of the facts? Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort and to what end. After seeing this film, you will decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee.” [Link to Hot Coffee, the Movie, website.]

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Oregon Nonprofits and the Law

Law librarians get all sorts of questions about nonprofit organizations. We get questions from nonprofit board members, donors, lawyers hired by nonprofits, and from people who want to set up nonprofits.

The biggest mistake people often make is assuming that creating and running a nonprofit is easy – or should be. It’s not and, arguably, it shouldn’t be. Nonprofits “redistribute the wealth” the same way any business or family head of household does and should be held to the same standards.

1) The best place to begin your nonprofit research is the Nonprofit Association of Oregon (NAO) (formerly known as TACS) and their the excellent Oregon nonprofit corporation handbook, which is the place to begin for any and all Oregon nonprofit questions. (Most Oregon public libraries have the handbook.)

Posted in: Legal Subject Area Guides

Tagged: Nonprofits

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Eight Rules of Implementing Court E-Filing Systems

Legal Informatics Blog alerts us to the forthcoming:

McMillan: Eight Rules of E-Filing and on to the Eight Rules of E-Filing at the Court Technology Bulletin, which alerts us that they will:

‘… Over the next several weeks we will offer eight rules of E-filing systems implementation. However, please note that there are many additional factors in any successful implementation as defined in classic project management structures including proper governance, budget, testing, and communication that cannot be ignored. So please keep that in mind as you read our “rules“….’ [Link to introductory post.]

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Meeting of the Law Librarian Bloggers, AALL 2011, Philadelphia

Our blogger-buddies at the Dallas Association of Law Librarians post the details of the AALL Annual Meeting of Law Library Bloggers, to be held in Philadelphia, during the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), July 2011

Two lists of Law Library / Law Librarian Blogs:

1) http://aallcssis.pbworks.com/w/page/1189465/Law-Library-Blogs

Posted in: Libraries

Tagged: Bloggers-librarians

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Oregon Legislature May Increase Small Claims Court Jurisdictional Limit to $10,000

If the Oregon Legislature passes 2011 HB 2710, as amended on 6/27, it will increase the jurisdictional limit of Small Claims Court to $10,000.

You can find this bill (HB 2710 B-engrossed, June 27, 2011) from the Legislature’s Measure Search or Bills website.

Legal minds will differ on this, but my informal tally so far shows that there are an awful lot of consumer-friendly lawyers worrying about this increase in jurisdictional amount from $7,500 to $10,000, without some corresponding court-managed small claims case preparation assistance made available (the way the courts provide family law assistance for self-represented litigants).

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