Michael G. Romano, Oregon Trial Lawyer

Michael G. Romano
Michael G. Romano — Father, Trial Attorney, & Author

Michael G. Romano is a father, trial lawyer, and author in Portland, Oregon. He compiled and maintains Oregon.Legal.

Law and computers, from the beginning

He was born in Tucson, Arizona, into a family of lawyers and entrepreneurs. His father was a prominent business attorney. His uncle was, and remains, a well-known Arizona family-law attorney. Legal work was not an abstraction in that household; it was the subject of conversation at dinner, and the questions that came with it — what a rule requires, who it binds, how obligations are resolved — were familiar long before he considered practicing law himself.

His interest in computers began at nearly the same age. In the late 1970s, his father enrolled him in a summer programming course at the University of Oregon, where he learned BASIC on the Apple systems of the era. It was an unusual thing for a child to be doing at the time. It stuck.

Those two interests ran alongside each other for the next two decades. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Political Science, with a minor in Philosophy, from Southern Oregon University, and his Juris Doctor from Willamette University College of Law. During law school, he spent much of his free time designing and building websites on subjects that interested him. One of them, a reference site devoted to Glock pistols, became widely used at a moment when the public web was still young, and at one point drew more traffic than nearly every site associated with the law school itself. The lesson he took from it was not about firearms. It was that a well-organized body of information, made freely available, finds an audience far larger than anyone expects.

Practice

He was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 2000 and began his career as a prosecutor, handling misdemeanors in Klamath County, felonies in Coos County, and juvenile delinquency and dependency matters in Deschutes County. In 2006 he opened Romano Law, P.C., concentrating on family law and criminal defense, and opened a Portland office in 2013. He has tried hundreds of cases to juries and spent thousands of hours in courtrooms across the state.

He is a contributing author of *Inside the Minds: The Legality of Search and Seizure in DUI Cases* (Aspatore / Thomson Reuters, 2012), and edited Chapter 13 of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association's *DUII Notebook*, covering motions for judgment of acquittal and mistrials.

Why this project exists

The Oregon State Bar and the profession generally have spent years talking about access to justice. Much of that conversation concerns representation, and representation matters. But one of the most persistent barriers is simpler and more economic than that: ordinary people frequently cannot afford to hire a lawyer merely to learn what the law says. They are not seeking strategy or advocacy. They want to know which rule governs their situation, what it requires of them, and how it fits with the other rules around it. That is a question about information, and information is the one part of this problem that technology can actually solve.

Oregon does publish its law online, and that deserves acknowledgment. The difficulty is not secrecy. It is fragmentation. Statutes live in one place, administrative rules in another maintained by a different office, procedural and evidentiary rules somewhere else again, and the local rules that govern practice in a particular county are individual documents posted by individual courts. These bodies of law constantly refer to and depend on one another. A statute is implemented by an administrative rule. A procedural rule is modified by a local rule. An evidentiary question turns on a statute codified among the rules of evidence. Yet a member of the public is expected to know in advance that each of these sources exists, where it is kept, and how the pieces relate. Government publishing systems, built in an earlier era and rarely revisited, do not provide the comprehensive linking, cross-referencing, and navigation that current technology makes entirely feasible.

That is the gap this project was built to close. Oregon.Legal assembles those sources into a single, connected reference: every provision on its own page, every citation a working link, and the relationships between statutes, regulations, and court rules made explicit in both directions. It is intended for anyone who needs it — self-represented litigants, lawyers, students, journalists, businesses, and the merely curious. It is free, carries no advertising, and sits behind no paywall or account. It does not offer legal advice and is not a substitute for a lawyer. It makes the law itself easier to reach.

On written law

Mr. Romano is Jewish, by birth and by faith. He does not suggest that civil law should be grounded in religious law, and this project takes no position on such questions. But the Torah, and the body of commandments and mitzvot that accompany it, represents one of the oldest continuously studied systems humanity has produced for articulating how people should conduct themselves, treat one another, resolve obligations, and hold a society together. That tradition informs a conviction he holds about secular law as well: that written, knowable rules are among the most consequential things a civilization creates, and that they are worth treating with care.

It is easy to speak of "the law" as something abstract. In practice it is concrete and specific. It consists of constitutions, statutes, regulations, procedural rules, judicial decisions, and other formally adopted provisions, together with the institutions and processes through which they are interpreted and enforced. Those rules reach nearly every part of ordinary life — how people marry and divorce, raise and provide for children, work, build businesses, own property, drive, and answer to the state when accused of an offense. A society that expects its members to live under its law has a corresponding interest in that law being reasonably available to them.

Technology now makes it possible to present an entire state's body of law in a form that is navigable, interconnected, and comprehensible in ways that traditional government publishing has not achieved. Oregon.Legal is an effort to do precisely that for Oregon.

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