Every year the OSB Consumer Law Section considers nominations for three distinct awards: the Award of Merit, Lifetime Achievement, and Professionalism Award. These awards are only given to nominees who meet the highest standards and each award is not given every year. For 2020, Kyle Iboshi, Investigative Reporter at KGW news will receive the Award of Merit, Craig Colby, now retired attorney at law, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Michael Baxter of Baxter & Baxter LLP will also receive the lifetime achievement award.
About the Awards:
The Oregon State Bar Consumer Law Section’s Award of Merit recognizes an individual’s or entity’s recent efforts that have significantly advanced consumer rights in Oregon. These efforts could include a case, advocacy initiative, program or any other work that attempts to advance consumer protections. Particular attention is paid to such achievements which required the recipient to overcome adversity and/or which improved access to justice. It may be awarded to both legal professionals and members of the public.
The Oregon State Bar Consumer Law Section’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an outstanding individual who has dedicated their career to consumer protection and made a significant and sustained impact on the practice of consumer law.
About the Recipients:
Kyle Iboshi is an award-winning investigative news reporter with KGW who dedicates a substantial amount of his coverage to consumer protection issues. Last year, Iboshi’s in depth consumer protection reporting helped cause positive changes in the lives of Oregon’s most economically vulnerable citizens. His 2019-2020 series of reports titled “The Cost of Collections” examined the aggressive tactics used by the City of Portland to force people to pay up. Specifically, Iboshi’s reporting shed light on how Professional Credit Service sued an Oregon consumer twice to collect on a debt, at least a portion of which was never owed in the first place. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/city-of-portland-sent-evicted-homeowner-to-collections-then-sued-him-twice-for-water-he-never-used/283-b3aa1d5f-31f6-4f23-9a69-ce9aa7ef417b Thanks to Iboshi’s consumer protection reporting, the City of Portland actually changed the way it collects debt from Oregon’s most vulnerable consumers. Iboshi also operates as a public watchdog for consumer fraud scams. In November 2019 he dedicated an episode of his program Straight Talk to sharing some of the most common consumer complaints he gets, including the “grandparent scam.” He has helped countless Oregon consumers through his investigative reporting, and makes the job we do as consumer advocates easier by informing the public of the work we do.
Michael Baxter: Throughout his career as a trial lawyer Baxter was a champion of consumer protection in Oregon. Baxter is responsible for the landmark Oregon Supreme Court case, Parrott v. Carr Chevrolet, Inc., 331 Or 537 (2001) that assists attorneys trying UTPA cases or seeking punitive damages in a consumer protection case. Baxter is also responsible for the single largest individual consumer protection verdict in Oregon history, Miller v. Equifax Info. Servs., LLC, No. 3:11-CV-01231-BR, 2014 US Dist LEXIS 70885 (D Or May 23, 2014), which garnered him recognition by The New York Times and other newspapers. In addition to being an incredible advocate for his clients, Baxter has also always been generous to younger lawyers, and has always been happy to share his knowledge with the consumer protection bar. Baxter, along with other consumer protection stalwarts, was responsible for reviving the Oregon Consumer League in the 1990s, an organization that continues to help Oregon consumers to this day. Baxter retired this year. Congratulations on his well-deserved retirement.
Craig Colby: For the last thirty years Craig has contributed substantially in the area of landlord tenant law. For years Colby maintained hundreds of pages of Annotations to the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act which he provided for free to legal aid and related organizations to make it possible for more lawyers to represent tenants successfully and increase access to justice. Three decades ago lawyers for tenants settled eviction cases by conceding judgments of eviction to the landlords in return for delays in enforcement and tenants then had eviction judgments in the public record that blocked them from finding new rental housing. Colby created the idea of dismissing the eviction cases in return for tenant promises to move out by some agreed date down the line, coupled with stipulations for reinstatement of the case and immediate judgment that landlords could file if tenants didn’t vacate on time. The legislature adopted Colby’s scheme in ORS 105.145(2) – 105.165. Congratulations on his well-deserved retirement.
Kyle Iboshi & Craig Colby will be presented with their awards, remotely, over the lunch hour at the “Law of Landlords and Tenants” CLE on Friday, October 16, 2020. Michael Baxter will be presented with his award sometime in the future when in-person gatherings become possible again.