This site now offers a fast and free search engine, to find relevant Oregon cases from the last ten years. Included are Oregon cases about civil law, criminal law, negligence, contracts and all the other issues that were appealed. The search results link to the slip opinions of the Oregon Supreme Court and Oregon Court of Appeals.
You can get much of what you need in 10 minutes using this feature. Just put the relevant words into the search box, and click on the Go! button.
If you get more than 50 results, add more words to the search box to narrow down the results. You may see that you need to put in a negative term to eliminate irrelevant results that tend to include your search words.
Then, print the first results page. The first page of results will have the top 10 cases, put at the top by the statistical ranking calculated by the search program.
With the print out in hand, start clicking on the results, top to bottom. If a case is irrelevant, cross it off and go to the second, etc. In a few minutes you will have close to a finished understanding of the relevant law.
This search facility is fast. I suspect it is much faster than the competition. In fairness to the competition, the database is only 10 years of case law. You are invited to run a speed test comparison and let me know what your experiment reveals.
The site works reasonably well if you use an iPhone or a T-Mobile G1 phone, given the limitation of using the small screen on such a smart phone. Making a search from your smart phone may be of use if you need a quick look while you are out of the office, perhaps while waiting in the courthouse and you just spotted another issue.
Your comments are invited, and will help improve the search facility.
– E. J. Simmons