Eviction filings in Oregon
Oregon law already protects tenants. To evict someone, a landlord has to follow strict rules. We check new eviction cases against those rules and flag the defective notices for a tenant's attorney before the hearing.
The tenant pays nothing: when they win, Oregon law makes the landlord cover the lawyer's fees.
See what the filings showPublic Oregon court filings, 2026
Figures drawn from public Oregon court filings read against ORS Chapter 90. ORS 90.255 fee-shifting lets a tenant who prevails recover attorney fees.
Why
The rules are already on the books. An Oregon eviction notice has to comply with ORS Chapter 90, line by line.
What's missing is enforcement. Compliance depends on the tenant reading the paperwork in time and catching what isn't there. Most of the time they can't, and the landlord counts on that. The rules end up working only for people who can audit them.
We read the paperwork so they don't have to.
What the data shows
More than 2,000 new eviction filings, read against the statute, from across the state. The clearest pattern is in who gets handed the defective paperwork.
A renter in one of Oregon’s lowest-income neighborhoods is about twice as likely to be handed a defective eviction notice as a renter in one of its wealthiest. The tenants with the fewest resources to fight back get served the broken paperwork most often.
Defect rate compared across neighborhoods by renter income, using the filings read here and renter-income data from the American Community Survey (2024 5-year). A directional finding from an ongoing hand review, not a fixed rate. It is measured at the neighborhood level, which understates the gap between individual households.
of Oregon tenants have a lawyer in eviction court. Landlords have one 46% of the time, or 62% counting non-lawyer agents.
is the median gap from the day a case is filed to the hearing. That is the whole window a tenant has to find counsel.
Representation figures are from Oregon Judicial Department court records (as of January 2025), presented in Oregon Law Center legislative testimony and visualized by Portland State University's Evicted in Oregon project. The filing-to-hearing figure comes from the filings read here, which span the state, from Portland and Gresham to Eugene, Salem, Beaverton, and Medford.
What the screening sees
Each notice is checked against the statutory requirements for its type. ORS 90.255 fee-shifting is what makes it worth an attorney's time. No lawyer can read thousands of filings hunting for the defective few. The screening does.
Who we are
I'm Ben Rood. I taught chess in public schools for eight years and tutored the LSAT. Both really just amounted to translating jargon into something regular people could use. That's what pulled me into consumer-rights law, where Oregon's tenant protections live. The protections are real, but you have to catch what's wrong in your paperwork before the hearing, and there's rarely time. So I read it for you, free.
Every weekday I read new Oregon FED filings against the strict-compliance requirements of ORS Chapter 90. When a notice is defective, I send it to a defense attorney with the quoted defective language, the controlling statute, and the hearing date.
In 2025 I sued a California school district, representing myself, over seats at a selective public school it set aside for university faculty's kids. A court ordered it to produce records it had claimed didn't exist. The case is here.
We're free to tenants and always will be. We're not a law firm and never ask a tenant for money. We connect people with a licensed Oregon attorney, and the legal call is always theirs.
We work with a small number of Oregon tenant attorneys who can act on flagged cases before the hearing. If that's your work, reach out.
A note on scope
The screening flags factual anomalies in a filing and matches them against statutory checklists. It isn't legal advice, doesn't speak for a lawyer, and doesn't decide whether a defect would carry in court. Every legal call belongs to a licensed Oregon attorney.
For attorneys
If you defend Oregon tenants, the screening does the searching. Each flagged case arrives with the potentially defective language quoted, the statute it implicates, and the hearing date.