Why was a Personal Injury Attorney Hired as Governor Kotek’s General Counsel?
Just who is Richard Lane?
I’ve been asking myself this for nearly five years, since I first saw his name appear in records I received from then-Governor Kate Brown and her own General Counsel, Misha Isaak: Who the heck is Richard Lane, and why is he on Brown’s “Judicial Screening Panel” to help her fill a vacant Supreme Court seat?
There was a ton of information regarding the other two people on Brown’s panel: Peenesh Shah was (and still is) an Assistant Attorney General who specializes in appellate law; and Robert Koch was at the time an appellate attorney at Tonkon Torp, and who prior to that had nearly a decade of experience at the U.S. Department of Justice.
But Richard Lane was a mystery with virtually no online presence. I even inadvertently reached out to Richard K. Lane first, because at least I could find some stuff about him on the internet that suggested (maybe, possibly, if you squint) he was qualified in some way to sit on a panel helping the Oregon Governor pick a new Supreme Court Justice. But no, wrong guy:
It’s Richard A. Lane, whose website didn’t even have a menu on it, and listed no way to contact him. The site was literally just some artistic brushstroke rendering of his initials. I mouse-hovered in every corner thinking I was mistaken… but I wasn’t.
I’ve never before or since seen a personal injury attorney website that looked like Richard Lane’s. Even the most elite websites appear only a few steps removed from a stereotypical ambulance chaser, and none of them have zero information related to practice areas, cases won, or even a phone number. It’s actually bizarre.
More importantly, I couldn’t find anything about his cases online, except that he lost a medical malpractice case in which a surgeon cut off a baby’s testicles. Which is to say, Lane may not even be a good personal injury attorney.
Yet somehow, Governor Brown chose this guy to help her pick judges.
What really jumped out at me, though, was on the very last page of records I received from Brown’s office — a screenshot of text messages that were exchanged between Lane and Misha Isaak:
These text messages caught my eye for a few reasons: the familiarity between a seemingly unremarkable personal injury attorney and the Governor’s General Counsel; that Isaak had Lane’s contact info programmed into his phone; that Lane had, by October 2018, previously sat on at least one of Brown’s judicial selection committees; and that he and Isaak were “getting the band back together.”
That line seemed particularly insidious to me at the time, and it remains dark sounding.
It smells of influence and access to power that few can conceive of. And while it was not Isaak that uttered the line, less than a year later he tried to snatch a high court seat for himself, well-outside the usual process that he was discussing by text with Lane — a scandal which appears to have driven Isaak out of the Governor’s Office.
Fast forward to 2023, and Lane is now the General Counsel to Governor Tina Kotek.
How on earth did Lane get there? He appears even less qualified to be a governor’s actual full-time lawyer than he was to help a governor occasionally select judges.
Virtually all of Lane’s career up to this point was filing medical malpractice and personal injury claims. Neither of those practice areas will help him advise Governor Kotek — a non-lawyer — as she navigates the many legal issues that face her office during her term.
And that includes any scandals that Kotek may face, or is already facing.
It raises questions about what exactly Lane advised Kotek to do during the time that she knew about then-Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s improper moonlighting, but before that news became public — aside from not talk about it.
It raises even greater concerns about Brown’s lingering influence over the office that Kotek now occupies, particularly in light of the current vacancy on the Oregon Supreme Court that Lane will help her fill.
A personal injury attorney, with no apparent experience in government or ethics… How on earth did Richard Lane get this job?
