Oregon State Bar
The Oregon State Bar is a public corporation and instrumentality of the Oregon Judicial Department in the U.S. state of Oregon. Founded in 1890 as the private Oregon Bar Association, it became a public entity in 1935 that regulates the legal profession. The public corporation is part of the Oregon Judicial Department.
Lawyers are required to join the OSB in order to practice law in Oregon, unless an exception applies.
OSB is charged with administering lawyer admissions and discipline, pursuant to rules proposed by bar association and approved by the Oregon Supreme Court. It also administers the Legal Services Program which funds legal aid in Oregon and provides accountability by maintaining standards and guidelines for legal aid providers.
OSB is governed by a 19 person Board of Governors — 15 of the board's members are lawyers, and four are public members.
Summary
Oregon has an "integrated bar": all attorneys in Oregon are required to join the Oregon State Bar if they desire to practice law in Oregon.Membership fees and program fees from the 16,000 active members, together with revenue from bar programs, fund the entire budget of the agency. OSB has approximately 100 employees and is overseen by a Board of Governors. This 19 person board group along with the 200-member House of Delegates and the Oregon Supreme Court provide governance for the agency's activities.
OSB also administers a board on attorney discipline and the Board of Bar Examiners. Additionally, the bar makes recommendations for filing mid-term judicial vacancies in the courts of the Oregon Judicial Department. These recommendations are given to the Governor of Oregon who makes the final appointment decision.
Most lawyers in private practice are also required to participate in the Oregon Professional Liability Fund, a self-funded insurance program. As of 2006, the program premium was $3,000 per year for $300,000 in coverage. Oregon was the first state to adopt the mandatory insurance scheme for attorneys.
OSB administers several programs to facilitate finding legal representation. The bar's Lawyer Referral Service has around 600 attorneys statewide that practice every area of law. The service receives around 75,000 calls per year and makes approximately 50,000 referrals. The Modest Means Program offers reduced fee representation in family law, criminal law, and landlord/tenant cases.
The Problem Solvers Program offers a free 30-minute consultation to teens aged 13–17. The Military Assistance Panel offers two hours of pro bono work to active duty military members. The Lawyer-to-Lawyer Program connects lawyers with more experienced attorneys who are willing to give guidance over the phone at no cost.
Name
The Oregon Bar Association was a voluntary association from 1890 to 1935. During its existence, OBA was also commonly referred to as the "Oregon State Bar Association" even though that was not its formal name.The "Oregon State Bar" is a public corporation established in 1935 by the Oregon Legislature to replace OBA. In popular usage, the term "Oregon Bar Association" has been often used to describe OSB.
History
The Oregon Bar Association was organized on November 8, 1890. One vice-president was selected from each of the seven judicial districts of Oregon. The original bar association was not created by a statute and was not incorporated. Membership was voluntary, although as of July 1, 1927, any lawyer who became a member of a local bar association was automatically deemed to be a member of the Oregon Bar association.The first president of the Oregon Bar Association was Cyrus A. Dolph, a prominent lawyer who had begun practice in Portland, Oregon in 1866. The bar association's first annual meeting was held on October 17, 1891, in Portland. The constitution and by-laws of the association provided for committees on jurisdiction and statutory reform, judicial administration and remedial proceedings, legal education and admission to the bar, grievances as to alleged misconduct by lawyers, and admission and membership. There was also an executive committee elected by the association, with other members appointed the association's president.
By 1900, the work of the first three committees was found to have overlapped on occasion, and the legislative affairs committee had endorsed too many bills, thereby losing some of the association's credibility with the legislature, which had its own institutional problems in the 1890s The grievance committee investigated allegations of misconduct by the public, and if they were found to be well-founded, would bring proceedings against the lawyer in the Supreme Court of Oregon It was reported in 1900 that "many complaints are brought on misunderstanding, mostly occurring out of ill-formed arrangements between so-called lawyers who solicit bad collections and their clients."
Early disciplinary proceedings
As of October 19, 1895, the Oregon Bar Association was working towards the disbarment of eight attorneys, on grounds of false undertakings in attachment and admiralty proceedings, gross drunkenness and misbehavior in court, uttering false certificates for admission of Chinese immigrants, false statements to a notary public, falsifying documents purporting to show payment a debt to an estate, defamation and extortion, embezzlement, larceny, and misappropriation of funds held in trust held for clients.One of the attorneys, U.S. Grant Marquam, who was charged with misappropriation of client funds, was the son of millionaire and prominent politician Philip A. Marquam. Four of the eight lawyers had been convicted of crimes forming the basis for the disbarment proceedings, and one of those four was already in the state penitentiary.
Advertising restrictions
In 1892, a lawyer ran an advertisement in several daily newspapers which stated: "" Divorces a specialty ; reliable advice, prompt, attention and moderate fee; no fee until after divorce. Apply Attorney, room 3 at 280½ Washington street, comer Fourth, City." The Grievance Committee found that the advertisement was neither illegal nor grounds for disbarment, but criticized it as being unprofessional. During a discussion of the advertisement, grievance committee member L.B. Cox objected to the attorney's not listing his name and further promising no fee until the divorce was concluded, and argued that these factors were grounds for disbarment. A motion was then passed to refer the matter back to the Grievance Committee with instructions to bring it to the attention of the supreme court.In 1908 the American Bar Association approved 32 "Canons of Professional Ethics." In 1935, those Canons were adopted, in part, by the Oregon Supreme Court and the then-recently organized Oregon State Bar Association. ABA Ethics Canon 27 stated that it was unprofessional conduct for a lawyer to solicit business by advertising.
Many years later, broad bar association restrictions on lawyer advertising were stricken down in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona as violations of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. Even after Bates, bar associations were still free to regulate advertising that was "false, deceptive, or misleading." Under OSB rules in effect in 2022, the text 1892 advertisement would likely subject the lawyer to discipline, as it is required that the advertisement include the lawyer's name. Current bar rules further forbid a lawyer from charging "any fee in a domestic relations matter, the payment or amount of which is contingent upon the securing of a divorce."
Murder of bar prosecuting counsel
On the afternoon of Saturday, November 28, 1908, attorney Ralph B. Fisher, who had been the prosecutor for the grievance committee of the Oregon State Bar Association was shot and killed in his Portland office in the Mohawk Building by former attorney James Anderson Finch.Finch had been disbarred for having appeared in court in an intoxicated condition and forging the name and notarial seal of his law partner to an affidavit. Fisher had presented the disbarment case against Finch to the Oregon Supreme Court.
Wire stories reported Fisher had refused to help Finch be reinstated into the bar. The evidence though was that Fisher,even though the bar's prosecutor in a clear case against Finch, had aided him by urging the Supreme Court to find him capable of reform and not impose full disbarment, but rather a suspension only, a recommendation which the court followed.
The Oregon Daily Journal broadly portrayed Finch as mediocre lawyer and a drunk, with revenge as his motive. The Sunday Oregonian provided details such as the nature of the disbarment proceedings for Finch.
Finch was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Governor Frank W. Benson refused to commute the sentence, even though the petition was taken to him personally by Finch's wife, to whom he had been married less than a year. Finch was executed by hanging at Salem on November 12, 1909, in a scene reported luridly in the newspapers.
Qualifications to practice
At the bar association's annual convention in 1903, lawyer A.F. Flegel proposed the adoption of measures proposed by the committee on legal education and admission to the bar to raise the standard of general and legal education in the legal profession in the state. Lawyer R.R. Duniway objected to any change which would make it more difficult for applicants to practice, saying that he could not have practiced if the requirements proposed by the committee had been in effect when he was admitted to the bar. Duniway's remarks that "there is no use in trying to shut out some man who don't know very much, but who would make a rattling good lawyer" were reported to have excited "much amusement", but even so the motion was adopted.In 1913, the Oregon Supreme Court created a five-member Board of Bar Examiners, appointed by the Oregon Bar Association for three year terms, to determine the qualifications of applicants to the bar, and make recommendations to the supreme court as to whether they should be admitted. Before then, candidates for admission had been examined by the court itself, or by its designees.
In November 1915 the board of examiners of the bar association proposed new educational requirements for admission to practice. According to a newspaper article published in November 1915, there were hundreds of lawyers in Oregon unable cope with the difficult legal conditions of the time, who had passed the bar examination "when that barricade was more or less a joke.". The same article continued to state that "t was customary to pass every applicant for a certificate to practice law in this state, and no matter how little the applicant knew of law, he had a reasonable assurance that he would get that certificate."
Under the 1915 proposal, candidates for admission to the bar would be required to have at least a high school education or its equivalent, and would have to show that they had studied law for three years. It was not until 1941 that graduation from an approved law school became a requirement for admission.