How did we answer that? Contract Law

We got an email asking for assistance with contract law, specifically breach of contract. The email specified a dollar amount, which was greater than can be claimed in Small Claims Court, so we limited our response to resources in Civil Court.

Our first suggestion was to start with Nolo press self-help book. We recommended Contracts: The Essential Business Desk Reference and Represent Yourself in Court: Prepare and Try a Winning Case. We suggested these titles for different reasons. The first because it was about Contracts and might have substantive information on breach of contract. The second because it has valuable information about the court process and what someone is going to need to know if they represent themselves. Nolo books can be found at many public libraries, online via the State of Oregon Law Library, as well as many Law Libraries.

We also let them know that the Washington County Law Library has additional resources on contract law, including the Oregon State Bar publication Contract Law in Oregon, and general books on contract law.

As an initial online resource we let them know that OregonLawHelp.org has some information on Oregon consumer law.

We also linked to the Oregon State Bar’s lawyer referral service in case they wanted to contact a lawyer.

Unfortunately, we discovered they were in Washington County, Wisconsin when they asked us why we were linking to Oregon resources. As Washington County is the most common name for a county, we occasionally receive questions for a different state.

We were able to reply that the Nolo titles might still be helpful but also linked to a couple of local resources for county/state legal information.