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Another reminder to be grateful for the abundance we share

9/3/2014

Thanks to my clients, I am able to support terrific organizations like Salem Harvest:

Dear Mr. Gear,

I hope you're having a wonderful summer. Salem Harvest's season is off to a great start. We had a big rush of cherries at the beginning of summer then incredible blueberry production (5 tons of blueberries donated. yes, 5 tons!!)

As we follow the produce in the valley, we had a lull between crops and now the heavy hitters are lining up. For example, we had a zucchini harvest last week and put almost 6 tons in Marion Polk Food Share's cooler in 1 day. This week is a series of pear harvests that should yield a donation of 12-18,000 pounds. Plus broccoli and onions too.

With the dry, sunny weather, the produce quality as been top notch. All of the equipment that your sponsorship helped us acquire has really made us much more efficient, getting more food to those who need it.

Thank you very much for your support. I'm grateful for your donation and very am excited about the ongoing 2014 harvest season.

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More new titles available for loan to nonprofit leaders

5/16/2014

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I make my reference library on nonprofit governance and fundraising available for free loan to nonprofit boards and executives -- click the image above to go to my library catalog, where you can browse the many titles (look for the tags that interest you to sort through the 300+ titles; you can start with fundraising and nonprofits).

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Two new resources for nonprofit leaders in John Gear Law Office library

4/17/2014

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I maintain an extensive collection of resources to assist me in my practice, which nearly all consists of working to help consumers, elders, employees, and nonprofits. Rather than have these valuable resources sit idly, I make them available to nonprofit boards and executives in the Salem area. To check out my collection, go here, and search on items tagged with "nonprofits" to winnow down the collection to those helpful for nonprofit leaders.

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OregonAdminRules.org now even better!

1/24/2014

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As I announced a while back, I recently found a programming maestro with the technical chops to help me realize a long-held goal of making the Oregon Administrative Rules readily accessible to anyone in Oregon who wanted to use them. The "official" copy available online is formatted so badly (using tiny type and no indenting) that it positively defeats a user who isn't willing to copy the entire chapter and spend hours reformatting it so that the layout doesn't cause you to misread it.

Thanks to Maestro's mad coding skillz, you now have free “one click” access to a properly formatted, very readable copy of every Oregon Administrative Rule chapter.

Need bigger text for reading ease? Just click on the + sign in the upper right corner.
Want more text per screen? Just click the - sign.
\Want to take it offline entirely, or import to a document? Just use your mouse or keyboard commands to copy and paste the full text of any chapter where you need it, or you can click again to go directly to the appropriate subsection, highlight just the text you need, and copy and paste to your document.

At last---a clear, readable, well-formatted version of the complete set of the Oregon Admin Rules now online

OregonAdminRules.org is a free public service to Oregon attorneys and all Oregonians, provided by a partnership of

   * John Gear Law Office LLC, John@JohnGearLaw.com
   * Hanson & Walgenkim, LLC, Hansonwalgenkim.com
   * 855ZipDebt.com, Consumer Bankruptcy law, and
   * Lawptimize, a legal productivity apps foundry.

OregonAdminRules.org was inspired by the refreshing ease and error-reducing readability of OregonLaws.org. Now the Oregon Admin Rules, which are often at least as important to the public and practitioners as statutes, are available in a readily accessible, readable form as well.

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At last---a clear, readable, well-formatted version of the complete set of the Oregon Admin Rules now online

11/18/2013

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Announcing OregonAdminRules.org

a free public service to Oregon attorneys and the public provided by a partnership of

* John Gear Law Office LLC
* Hanson & Walgenkim, LLC
* 855ZipDebt.com, Consumer Bankruptcy law
* Lawptimize, a legal productivity apps foundry

Creation of OregonAdminRules.org was inspired by the refreshing ease and error-reducing readability of OregonLaws.org (the best place to find readable Oregon Revised Statutes). OregonAdminRules.org now brings that same idea to the OARs, which are often just as important to the public and practitioners as statutes.

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New: Free for Nonprofits--Borrow books of interest for nonprofits from the John Gear Law Office nonprofit library

8/23/2013

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One of the biggest challenges facing nonprofit businesses is access to reliable guidance about how to do business -- how to be effective while complying with the myriad laws that affect how the nonprofit operates.

To help Oregon nonprofits meet this challenge, I've decided to make my library available to Oregon nonprofit board members and nonprofit executives. Check out books tagged as "nonprofits" in my office library here, and contact me if you want to arrange to borrow any of the resources, at no charge.

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Don't do this to yourself -- don't talk or text while driving!

8/12/2013

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Top 10 Tips to Avoid Being Ripped Off -- from Oregon DOJ

5/20/2013

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consumer_protection_brochure.pdf
File Size:	85 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

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Are you struggling to make it financially, or do you know someone who is?

11/22/2012

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Need help affording or keeping a cellphone?

Look into Assurance Wireless, a federally funded program to help people with low incomes by making sure that they can have lifeline phone service. If you qualify, it's a free phone and 250 minutes a month. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

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Why I must apologize but cannot answer your emails

3/30/2012

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    Below are a few bits from an email I got this morning. This one pretty much resembles other emails I get from people all over Oregon, people I've never met or talked to. I usually get several of these a week, sometimes several a day.

Mr. Gear-
I am not sure if you can help me or not. I am in the middle of an arbitration with . . . . Suddenly, at the hearing, his witness came up with something that [Attorney _____] said [Attorney ______] had no knowledge of until then. I asked for a continuance so I could read and try to interpret what this new report means.

I e mailed [Attorney _____] and received a couple of brief definitions as well as this closing remark -- "This information that you requested is beyond the scope of your discovery request and is in the nature of an Interrogatory which is not a permitted discovery device in OR. However at least as to this request, I am providing a response to you as a courtesy."

My question is, can they actually . . . ? [Attorney _____] is trying to confuse me or turn around what I say . . . . I do not have the money for an attorney but am in desperate need of some advice on what to do, especially with this new information.

    I normally just delete these, but I feel so bad about not being able to respond that I thought I would try to explain to my anonymous correspondent -- and anyone else who emails me like this -- why they won't hear back from me. It's not because I'm a jerk (or at least not only that).

    What the typical "civilian" (nonlawyer) doesn't know is that lawyers -- who can sometimes seem so absolutely certain of everything -- are pretty much just like normal people. Underneath the facade of bravado bordering on (if not crossing well into) arrogance, is a human being full of doubts and fears about everything, from fear of being revealed as an imposter and someone who never should have been allowed near a law license, to fear of getting a bad reputation with other attorneys and judges, to fear of being bankrupted or ruined by a small mistake that blows up into a nightmare of hearings and appeals. It all boils down to the same old human fears -- that we're going to lose our careers, security, and families because of a mistake made while casually trying to help a stranger in need, so no one will love us and that we're going to wind up collecting soda cans in a shopping cart and sleeping under a bridge.

    Pretty unlikely stuff, but fear isn't about rationality, it's about the lizard part of the brain that determines how we think about things before we've had a chance to "think" about them at all. And this is the killer part: some of the nightmare stories around this particular fear are true.

    That is, unlike the urban legends about hidden razor blades in apples given away on Halloween (no doubt started by clever kids who want real candy, not apples!), there really are true tales of horror stories where lawyers have been hurt bad or even undone by giving legal advice to non-clients while just trying to help them, one human to another.

    So, absurd as it sounds to people who don't live with these fears, a lawyer who responds to a emailed cry for help like this is risking their ticket to practice and an ordeal of responding to bar complaints, malpractice suits, and just generally suffering for a long time.

    I hate the whole fear thing, and I do my best to try not to be afraid of everyone I talk to, and to remain a decent person despite being a lawyer. But, even ignoring the issue of constantly being asked to give away my only product (legal advice) to complete strangers, there's no way that I can stay in practice for long if I give legal advice to random callers and emailers, because there's no way to do that without screwing it up. And, given my low-costs, low-overhead, low-fee practice model, I can't afford any time spent answering a bar complaint lodged by a non-client -- the first one of those will probably put me out of business entirely.

    So, while it pains me to constantly be reminded what a disfigured and inadequate legal system we have and how it systematically, relentlessly, and remorselessly denies access to justice to precisely the people who most need it, I too wind up going along, refusing to help the stranger whose cry for help reaches my ear or email account.

    All I can suggest is that, when you find yourself in a bind and unable to afford even the Oregon State Bar's modest means program, you contact every elected official who is supposed to represent you and tell them how the lack of adequate civil legal services is affecting you. I have some ideas for broadening access to justice that I'm working on, and with luck they will bear fruit before too many more years go by; but in the meantime, since America has not yet recognized access to justice as a fundamental right, we ration it by price: those with money can have all they want; those without money are left with scraps or pushed out in the cold entirely. The corporations like it this way, and the corporations decide who gets elected in this country. Frighteningly, these corporations are becoming increasingly active in judicial races.

    Until real people -- human people -- unite to demand a civil justice system that is more than just rhetorically open to all, we're stuck. I do my part, I'd appreciate it if you would do yours: Every time you get a chance, every time a candidate asks for your vote, tell your elected officials and candidates, from dog-catcher on up, that you want them to fund a robust expansion of civil legal aid programs until every real person in America with a legal problem is able to afford to get the help they need.

Postscript: You would think that disavowing science and preferring the insights of revelation to all the evidence would keep you from getting an invitation to speak to a lawyer trade show all about the toys that could only be created after scientists unlocked some pretty deep secrets in nature. Weirdly, Ben Stein -- who has managed to cultivate a rep as a smart guy, but who pushes creationism -- was invited to give a keynote talk to the ABA Tech Show. Still, he is apparently smart on non-science matters:

    “We all have rights, but it can be staggeringly expensive to possess those rights,” Stein said, “Unless you can get access to a lawyer, there’s a greatly diminished chance of getting access.”
    “This makes [lawyers] and their clients richer in material and emotional ways, more powerful as human beings and citizens,” Stein said to a packed audience. “U.S. and Canadian lawyers take their greatest national inheritances and they share it with everyone else who is not necessarily rich. They let everyone all over North America know they have legal rights and what those legal rights are and what they aren’t.”

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Another reminder to be grateful for the abundance we share

More new titles available for loan to nonprofit leaders

Two new resources for nonprofit leaders in John Gear Law Office library

OregonAdminRules.org now even better!

At last---a clear, readable, well-formatted version of the complete set of the Oregon Admin Rules now online

New: Free for Nonprofits--Borrow books of interest for nonprofits from the John Gear Law Office nonprofit library

Don't do this to yourself -- don't talk or text while driving!

Top 10 Tips to Avoid Being Ripped Off -- from Oregon DOJ

Are you struggling to make it financially, or do you know someone who is?

Why I must apologize but cannot answer your emails

Subscribe to get occasional emails from John Gear Law Office.

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