How long will it take for my appeal to be decided?
The Oregon Court of Appeals edition
I’m back with another installment of “how long will it take for my appeal to be decided?” Today, we’ll be looking at the Oregon Court of Appeals.
The topline numbers
It takes 143 days (mean) or 56 days (median) across all cases.
Civil and criminal cases fall right within this average.
Cases without argument are decided in 103 (mean) / 47 days (median), and with argument are decided in 201 / 100 days.
Concurrences and dissents add substantial time on average.
Affirmances take half as long as reversals.
With mean and median so far apart, outliers are obviously skewing the mean. This is clear when you look under the hood: 12.3% of cases were decided within 30 days, and 38.9% were decided between 31 and 60 days—meaning over 50% were decided in 60 days or fewer. Conversely, 11.4% of cases took longer than a year to decide.
Breaking it down by case type
Surprisingly, case type (mostly) doesn’t matter. 54.5% of the cases were criminal (which is a notable fact in its own right), and the average opinion time in criminal cases was 143 days (mean) or 56 days (median). Civil cases were nearly identical at 146 days or 57 days respectively, making up 28.5% of the cases. So, together, criminal and civil cases made up 83% of the docket.
Because the other categories of cases had a much smaller sample size, it’s hard to read too much into the data. On the low end, workers’ compensation and employment cases (with a sample size of 30) took an average of 96 days (mean) or 43 days (median). Administrative appeals (with a sample size of 8) took 497 days (mean) or 553 days (median). That low sample size means we can’t read too much into the data, but it’s enough that I would advise clients in an administrative appeal to expect a long wait.
Does argument have an effect?
Yes, without a doubt. Cases that were submitted on the briefs (57.4% of the cases) took an average of 103 days (mean) or 47 days (median). In contrast, the cases that were argued took an average of 201 days (mean) or 100 days (median). That means you can expect your case to be decided twice as fast if it’s decided without argument.
(Of course, we don’t exactly know whether that’s because the easier cases are decided without argument, or the fact of argument makes the case take longer to decide. But I would bet on the former.)
Do concurrences or dissents have an effect?
A tentative yes. The sample size is pretty small, but in the 37 cases with only a concurrence, the mean number of days jumped from 143 to 219, and the median jumped from 56 to 140. In the 32 cases with only a dissent, the mean number of days jumped from 143 to 321, and median jumped from 56 to 255.
With these sample sizes, I can confidently say that cases with concurrences took roughly 2 weeks to 5 months longer, with a best estimate of about 80 additional days. Cases with dissents took roughly 2.5 to 10 months longer, with a best estimate of about 6 additional months.
As with the additional time for arguments, it’s not clear how much of this additional time is attributable to the actual concurrences/dissents themselves, or whether cases that spark a concurrence/dissent are just tougher cases in general.
What about disposition?
It turns out that you can even more precisely predict how long it will take your appeal to be decided if you know the outcome! It takes much longer to reverse a case than to affirm it. Of the 316 cases reversed, the mean was 219 days and the median was 119 days. Of the 1328 affirmed, the mean was 127 days and the median was 50 days. So, approximately half the time to affirm.
Another notable detail is how much more often cases get affirmed (3x as much). Good to keep in mind when you’re considering an appeal. I’ll break these numbers down even further in a future post.
Information about the data
This data is based on 1,862 opinions dating back to June 2024, excluding cases affirmed without opinions. I compiled the data using a script I made with Claude Code, which allowed me to quickly input the data without manually entering every date into Excel.