Anecdotally, in recent years more and more people use the internet to find the goods and services they need. As Oregon attorneys we have tried to adapt as best we can to meet our potential clients where they are: on the internet. In the past few years there has been a growing group of attorneys who are exceptional at leveraging internet advertising to become “Oregon attorneys”.
In general terms I don’t really view this as a bad thing because so long as attorneys do good work to help Oregonians with their legal issues, I think there is a net positive for my community simply because the work is getting done. The troubling aspects occur when I see terrible legal work being done by a lawyer who advertises as an Oregon lawyer but really is a Utah lawyer. In my estimation, this does damage to my community by giving lawyers a bad reputation, failing to provide fair compensation to Oregonians and taking work that would have been done competently by an Oregon attorney away from that local business.
In a technical sense, it is difficult to define whether a person is an Oregon attorney. The Oregon State Bar licenses attorneys to practice law within the state and frankly some attorneys who work primarily out of state are in fact licensed Oregon attorneys. Personally, I think the State Bar can do more to protect the public from attorneys who are lacking in competence because they are practicing law in multiple states. It is not easy to learn how to practice law, frankly it takes a lot of time to even read and understand the law in Oregon and even more time to be able to see and know that information in context such that it can be used for the benefit of a client. But, from my vantage point, when you know what right looks like it is pretty easy to see when an attorney is just wrong in their strategic choices. I, Joshua Hunking, am not a mechanically inclined person and when I go see an auto mechanic for some issue with my car it is not hard for me to see that. I don’t have the knowledge and experience that my mechanic has, so, they are much better equipped to fix my car; they can spot issues with the sound of the engine that I simply would not notice let alone be able to use as a diagnostic tool to fix the vehicle.
So, the question remains, how do I determine whether my Oregon car crash attorney is actually an Oregon attorney? As of today, the best answer I can give you is that we at Hunking Law are Oregon attorneys, while a couple of us are licensed in other states as well (Washington) we know enough to know not to gamble with someone’s future unless we know what we are talking about. Our Eugene and Corvallis offices are staffed 9-5 Monday through Friday so I guess I could suggest stopping by the office during business hours. But really, any relationship with a lawyer relies on trust, so hopefully you can just ask your lawyer at the intake whether they are in Oregon or not. As I write this I am sitting in Eugene Oregon. I woke up at my house near Brownsville Oregon and took I5 to get here. The other attorneys and paralegals at this firm also live in Oregon, we know these areas, we know these roads, we pay our taxes in Oregon and most of all we care about you because we, like you, are members of this Willamette Valley community and when you get fair compensation our community gets just a little bit better.