After a car accident or other event, you have the right to seek compensation for your medical bills. You also have the right to consult a highly recommended law firm, like DeShaw Law, in the wake of your personal injury event.
After an accident, Oregonians face a system that is complex, time-sensitive, and stacked against you. Understanding your legal rights—particularly while you are recovering from a serious injury—can be a tremendous challenge.
A competent personal injury attorney will not only prove the defendant’s duty of care (and breach of duty), but also assist with insurance claims management. Personal injury lawsuits in Oregon often include compensation for medical treatments, time away from work, and even emotional distress.
This guide is intended to give Oregon accident victims — and their families — an overview in plain language of the rights the law affords them, the deadlines that govern those rights, and the legal framework that determines how much compensation they may be entitled to recover. As with any serious legal matter, the specifics of your case will depend on facts and circumstances that only a qualified attorney can evaluate.
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Plaintiff Rights in an Oregon Personal Injury Lawsuit: An Overview
The Right to Compensation for Your Losses
Oregon law gives injured people the right to pursue financial recovery when another person's negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct causes them harm. That recovery encompasses two distinct categories of damages.
Economic damages are the quantifiable financial consequences of your injury: past and future medical expenses, surgical and rehabilitation costs, lost wages already incurred, and projected loss of future earning capacity. In cases involving serious injury — traumatic brain injury, spinal cord damage, amputation, or permanent disability — these figures can extend decades into the future and require expert testimony to properly document and present.
Non-economic damages compensate for losses that cannot be reduced to a receipt or a pay stub: physical pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, and the permanent changes an injury imposes on how a person functions, relates to others, and experiences the world. Oregon law does not cap non-economic damages in most personal injury cases, though ORS 31.710 limits non-economic damages to $500,000 in wrongful death claims.
Understanding what your full damages picture looks like — including the long-term consequences that are often invisible in the early stages of recovery — is one of the most important things an experienced personal injury attorney can do for you.
For a detailed breakdown of the factors that determine case value, see our post: "What Is My Case Worth?" 7 Factors That Affect Case Value.
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The Right to File a Claim Within Oregon's Statute of Limitations
Under ORS 12.110, most personal injury claims in Oregon must be filed within two years of the date of the injury. A lawsuit filed even one day after the limitations period expires will almost certainly be dismissed by the court, regardless of the merits of the claim or the severity of the injuries involved.
Several important exceptions and variations apply:
Wrongful death claims are governed by ORS 30.020 and carry a three-year statute of limitations from the date of the injury causing death (though this period may be shortened by intersecting statutes). Wrongful death lawsuits may only be brought by the personal representative of the decedent's estate.
Claims involving government defendants, for example a TriMet bus, trigger the Oregon Tort Claims Act, ORS 30.260–30.300. Under ORS 30.275, written notice of the claim must be provided to the appropriate public body within 180 days of the injury. For wrongful death claims against a public body, that notice period extends to one year.
Minors receive additional protections under ORS 12.160, which tolls the statute of limitations while the injured person is under the age of 18 — though the extension may not exceed five years, or one year after the person turns 18, whichever occurs first.
The discovery rule applies in cases where an injury's full nature or cause is not immediately apparent — a latent brain injury that manifests weeks after a crash, or complications from a previous trauma that are not diagnosed until later. In these situations, the two-year period may begin running from the date the injury was discovered, or reasonably should have been, rather than the date of the underlying event. Courts apply this standard objectively.
Put simply: time matters immediately when filing a personal injury claim in the state of Oregon. The sooner an attorney begins preserving evidence, interviewing witnesses, and evaluating the applicable deadlines, the better positioned your case will be. Contact us today for a free consultation.
The Right to Partial Compensation If You Are Partially At Fault
One of the most consequential — and most frequently misunderstood — aspects of Oregon personal injury law is ORS 31.600, the state's modified comparative fault statute. If you have been told you were partially at fault for your accident, that determination is not final, and it deserves careful legal scrutiny.
Under this rule, an injured person's recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault for the accident. If a jury finds that a plaintiff's total damages are $500,000 but that the plaintiff was 20% at fault, the plaintiff recovers $400,000. If a plaintiff is found to be 51% or more at fault, they recover nothing.
This threshold is precisely why insurance companies invest heavily in arguing that injured plaintiffs share blame for their own injuries. Assigning the plaintiff a higher percentage of fault simultaneously reduces the insurer's payout and, if they can push that percentage above 50%, eliminates it entirely. Fault arguments are not always made in good faith; they are often deployed strategically, regardless of the underlying facts.
An experienced personal injury attorney challenges those assignments aggressively. Accident reconstruction, expert testimony, witness statements, and experience with the Oregon court system can all be leveraged to improve your odds of collecting compensation.
Read our post: Can I Make a Personal Injury Case Even If I'm Partially at Fault?
Your Right to Pursue an Insurance Bad Faith Lawsuit
The Oregon Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act, ORS 746.230, prohibits a range of abusive claims-handling behaviors. This includes unreasonable denial, intentional delay, and misrepresentation of policy terms. Following the Oregon Supreme Court's landmark decision in Moody v. Oregon Community Credit Union, insurers can now face direct legal liability for the manner in which they handle claims.
When an insurer refuses to negotiate honestly, makes lowball settlement offers unsupported by any reasonable analysis, or uses proprietary software to systematically undervalue what an injured person is owed, those actions may constitute insurance bad faith — an independent legal claim with its own remedy.
Dr. Aaron DeShaw literally wrote the book on the bodily injury claim software that drives the vast majority of auto insurance settlement offers in the United States, giving DeShaw Law clients a level of insight into insurer behavior that few attorneys anywhere can match.
For a full explanation of what Oregon's bad faith protections mean for you, read: What Does "Delay, Deny, Defend" Mean?
Your Right to Choose The Best Portland Personal Injury Attorney
Oregon law gives every injured person the right to legal representation of their choosing. It is a right worth exercising carefully.
Insurance companies track plaintiff attorneys by their federal tax ID number and adjust settlement offers based on each attorney's history of trial outcomes, average settlement values, and demonstrated willingness to take cases before a jury. This is not speculation — it is documented by the Insurance Research Council and confirmed through decades of litigation experience. Firms with strong trial reputations and high verdict histories receive materially higher settlement offers than firms that settle every case.
At DeShaw Law, Dr. Aaron DeShaw holds the highest personal injury verdict in Oregon history — $77,523,748.93 in M.M. and N.S. v. Nicolopoulos — and has been selected for Oregon Super Lawyers in multiple consecutive years, a designation reflecting the top 5% of all Oregon attorneys as chosen by judges, mediators, and opposing counsel.
For a detailed discussion of why your choice of attorney directly affects the value of your case, read: Hiring the Best Personal Injury Lawyer and Your Lawyer Is a Very Important Factor in Your Personal Injury Settlement Offer.
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Other Questions About Your Legal Rights? Call DeShaw Law, Portland OR Personal Injury Lawyer
The rights outlined in this article are not self-executing; your rights are only as valuable as your willingness to assert them. They require timely action, thorough documentation, and skilled legal representation to be realized fully. The deadlines are real, the insurance industry is well-resourced and sophisticated, and the decisions made in the early stages of a claim have lasting consequences.
If you or a family member has been injured in an accident anywhere in Portland, the greater Multnomah County area, or throughout Oregon and Washington, contact DeShaw Law today for a free consultation. Call us at (503) 227-1233