the Supreme Court has recognized that, when viewed against the backdrop of the government’s sovereign immunity, the OTCA effectively serves as a partial waiver of sovereign immunity. Hale v. Port of Portland, 308 Or. 508, 512-17, 783 P.2d 506 (1989); Espinosa v. Southern Pacific Trans., 291 Or. 853, 864, 635 P.2d 638 (1981). To be sure, the OTCA necessarily limits the amount of damages that an injured party may recover from a government tortfeasor, but it does so only as a necessary consequence of the statute’s limitation on liability. By force of the statute, a claim against a government tortfeasor simply is not viable beyond the specified amounts. Surface v. Am. Spirit Ins. Cos., 154 Or. App. 696, 962 P.2d 717, 719(1998) (emphasis added); see also Griffin, 870 P.2d at 812-814 (<HOLDING>). Inasmuch as the OTCA expressly refers to
holding that by using the term liability which must refer to the duty or legal responsibility to pay money on a tort claim the legislature intended the otca limits to include attorney fees and costs holding that to establish tort liability in a negligence action there must be a legal duty on the part of the defendant to plaintiff recognizing that the term disbursements extends beyond the entity with the legal obligation to pay a debt and may include the one who benefitted by the expense but was not legally obligated to pay it recognizing that an award of temporary attorneys fees and costs is based on an assessment of need and ability to pay as well as the reasonableness of the fees and costs holding that a successful plaintiff in a legal malpractice action may recover initial fees a plaintiff pays or agrees to pay an attorney for legal services that were negligently performed and corrective fees incurred by the plaintiff for work performed to correct the problem caused by the negligent lawyer but not litigation fees which are legal fees paid by the plaintiff to prosecute the malpractice action against the offending lawyer