A substantial share of the cases filed in Deschutes County involve someone who does not live in Oregon. They came to ski, ride, float, or climb, something went wrong, and the resulting claim proceeds in a county where neither the plaintiff nor several of the material witnesses have a permanent address. That pattern shapes discovery in ways that a purely local docket would not, and it puts a premium on preserving testimony early and taking it remotely. Those are practical problems, and NAEGELI Deposition & Trial has built its Bend practice around solving them.
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The statutory discussion below is general background rather than legal advice.
Why Bend’s Docket Looks the Way It Does
An Economy That Runs on Visitors
The scale of Central Oregon’s visitor industry is easy to underestimate. Tourism employs roughly 10,650 people across the region and generated about $1.3 billion in total annual economic impact according to Visit Central Oregon’s reporting, with regional travel expenditures around $1.29 billion in 2024. Deschutes County accounts for the large majority of that activity, generating roughly 86 percent of the region’s travel spending and ranking third among Oregon counties in total travel expenditures, and it led the Central region with $24.7 million in transient lodging tax. Travel spending within the city of Bend alone was about $383.4 million in 2023.
Mount Bachelor anchors the winter side of it. Sitting 22 miles west of town, the resort covers 4,323 skiable acres with 101 trails and twelve lifts, and averages roughly 462 inches of snow a year. It is also the region’s second largest employer with about 1,117 workers, behind only St. Charles Health System, which employs some 4,791 people and operates hospitals in Bend, Redmond, Madras, and Prineville. Les Schwab, headquartered locally, ranks third.
Those three facts together describe the shape of local litigation. A recreation economy produces injuries. A single dominant health system means the treating providers, the records, and the expert witnesses in most injury cases come from one network. And a workforce concentrated in seasonal recreation and hospitality creates a distinctive discovery problem discussed below.
Claims Involving People Who Live Somewhere Else
When a visitor is injured skiing, mountain biking, rafting, or climbing, the case that follows may involve a plaintiff from another state, an equipment manufacturer somewhere else entirely, a guide service, a resort operator, and treating physicians in two jurisdictions. Multi-party litigation with geographically scattered witnesses is the norm rather than the exception, and the cost of assembling everyone in one room is frequently the largest line item in a discovery budget.
Recreational Immunity Has Been Genuinely Unsettled
For a city defined by its trails, one area of Oregon law deserves particular attention. Under ORS 105.682, an owner of land is generally not liable in contract or tort for personal injury, death, or property damage arising from recreational use of that land, the legislative bargain being that landowners open their property in exchange for protection.
That protection was thrown into doubt in July 2023, when the Oregon Court of Appeals decided Fields v. City of Newport, holding that a jury needed to determine whether an injured trail user’s principal purpose was in fact recreational. The Oregon Supreme Court declined to review it. CIS Oregon, the largest insurance carrier for Oregon cities and counties, took the position that the decision had effectively ended recreational immunity and advised member governments to consider closing trails, and closures followed across the state.
The legislature responded in two steps. Senate Bill 1576 in 2024 provided a temporary fix, expanding the definition of recreational purposes to include walking, running, and bicycling. Senate Bill 179, signed in May 2025 and effective at the start of 2026, made those changes permanent. For premises claims in a community with an extensive park district and trail network, this is directly load-bearing law, and it has moved twice in three years.
The Docket Has Seasons, and So Does the Workforce
Here is the discovery problem that catches counsel unfamiliar with a resort economy. Lift operators, ski patrollers, river guides, rental technicians, and hospitality staff are often seasonal employees. A witness who was working the day of an incident may be in another state or another country by the time a complaint is filed, and may be genuinely difficult to locate a year later. Injury claims arising from a February incident or an August float trip therefore reward early preservation of testimony far more than a typical commercial matter would.
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How the Bend Office Addresses It
The NAEGELI Deposition & Trial Bend office on SW Columbia Street offers large conference rooms with complete privacy, roughly five minutes from Deschutes Circuit Court, with Redmond Municipal Airport about 25 minutes out. Space matters more than it sounds in this market, because a recreation injury case with a resort, a guide company, an equipment maker, and multiple insurers puts a lot of counsel in one room.
Moving Quickly Enough to Preserve Testimony
When a witness may relocate at the end of a season, scheduling speed is a substantive advantage rather than an administrative one. Dedicated case managers are available 24 hours a day, scheduling is deliberately quick, and expedited transcripts are available, which together mean a deposition can be arranged and the record delivered inside a narrow window of availability.
Taking Testimony Wherever the Witness Ended Up
Remote depositions are the direct answer to a nonresident witness list. The firm has conducted thousands of them, allowing proceedings to run efficiently from any location, with a personal video technician assigned to manage and monitor each one from beginning to end. For a former seasonal employee now living three states away, this is often the difference between obtaining testimony and settling without it.
Real-Time Reporting for Medical Testimony
Injury cases turn on medical evidence, and treating physician and expert depositions arrive dense with clinical terminology. Real-time transcription lets counsel see the record as it forms and clarify a term immediately rather than discovering an error weeks later. The Bend reporters also handle witness interviews alongside formal proceedings, which is useful early in an investigation.
Video Suited to Physical Injury Claims
Video carries what a transcript cannot, which is why it does particular work in injury litigation. Certified videographers use current equipment to record proceedings, editing is tailored to the needs of the specific case rather than run through a standard template, and the finished recording can be delivered in any media format. A deposition showing how a claimant moves, or how an expert demonstrates a mechanism of injury, is evidence in a way a page is not.
Records, Exhibits, and Volume
A single injury case can involve years of medical records across multiple facilities, incident reports, maintenance logs, waivers, and photographs. Document services cover copying, scanning, electronic forensics, pagination, OCR, Bates stamping, trial exhibit production, secure pickup, and destruction. Consistent numbering across a set that large is what allows a deposition to proceed without twenty minutes lost to locating an exhibit.
Visitors Do Not All Speak English
An international visitor economy produces claimants and witnesses who need language support. Interpreters cover more than 200 languages including American Sign Language, and the transcription team can transcribe audio or video recordings in more than 200 languages, which matters when a witness statement, a phone call, or a bystander video was never recorded in English.
Showing a Jury What Happened
Trial presentation is where a reconstruction becomes persuasive. The team integrates documents, photographs, graphics, video, animation, and other exhibits into computer-based courtroom presentations, with equipment configured to the case, and was among the first in the nation to hold certification as Trial Presentation Professionals. Animation and graphics do specific work in a recreation injury trial, where a jury needs to understand a slope, a trail feature, or a river hazard they will never see.
The Practical Summary
A visitor economy generates cases whose participants disperse. The firms that handle them well are the ones that capture the record early, take it remotely when travel makes no sense, and deliver it in a form that still works two years later when the case finally reaches a courtroom.
