Lawyer Referrals for Jail and Prison Inmates in Oregon

Lawyer referrals in Oregon are made through the Oregon State Bar and, occasionally, from local or specialized bar associations and nonprofits. (The Oregon State Bar has a public website where you can check to make sure the lawyer is licensed to practice law in Oregon.)

Requests for a referral from the Oregon State Bar are made through email or telephone.

But what happens if you are in jail or prison? Here’s the information we got from the OSB Referral Service:

“… inmates can’t always get through. They can’t call 800 numbers at all and the 503 number requires the caller to navigate through a bunch of “press 1 if you want…” “press 63 if you need”, which doesn’t work with the prison system phone service. ”

The OSB Referral Service also said that “they receive a good number of written requests from inmates looking for referrals. And, they respond to them in writing. For outlying penitentiaries, [they] acknowledged that the OSB Service is slim on attorneys to refer, but that a “city-lawyer” would typically take these cases and be willing to travel to visit the inmate (if they had money to pay for representation).”