Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
In parts 1 and 2 of this article, we’ve covered the first 4 of 11 things that you should do to find the right Michigan DUI lawyer. To make this article more interesting, I’ve called these things the 11 “R’s” because each one begins with the letter “R.” In our last installment, we saw how you should rate those skills that a lawyer can bring to make things better in your DUI case. While there are certain skills that are just always good, OWI cases, by their very nature, involve an almost endless combination of people, places and other things that can make certain legal skills extremely useful in some situations, and utterly worthless in others. We’ll resume here and look at another important topic – money.
Resolve your budget. You need to know how much you can and should spend on a lawyer. These are always separate questions. If we’re going to be honest about it, some people simply cannot afford a better lawyer. There are plenty of “bargain” lawyers out there, but if there is one universal truth about legal fees, it’s that you’re never going to get top-notch services from a cut-rate lawyer. On the flip side, however, it is almost nearly as easy to pay too much for mediocre services. Whatever else, a person simply cannot pay what he or she cannot afford. You need to be honest with yourself about what you can do here, and that’s one of the reasons I publish my fees. I simply do not have the time (and it would be unfair to take it away from my paying clients) to spend with every caller, going over case details for those who cannot hire me. Personally, I am suspicious of any person or company that is secretive or not upfront about costs, so to me, listing my fees is only natural.
When it comes to those fees, I’m definitely not the lawyer for someone who is primarily concerned about cost. I have a specialized background, but still consider my fees reasonable, even though they are higher than those charged by bargain lawyers, who make their money by pleading out the greatest number of cases as quickly as possible. My practice is pretty much the opposite of that. This brings us to the idea of how much you should spend for a lawyer. As much as a person needs to find a lawyer who is a good fit for themselves, a lawyer (at least one whose survival does not depend on getting any and every potential client) should also be looking for a client that is a good fit for his or her way of doing things. Even if I could make more money quickly hustling cases through an assembly line type system, I’d rather spend more time on my cases and do everything the right way.
Rate those skills that are important to your case
To the extent it’s relevant, I will focus on OWI cases in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties, where I concentrate my practice as a Michigan DUI lawyer. Most of the time, a person arrested for a DUI is held in jail overnight, and then released the next day, often with various papers (these include, among other things, a temporary driving permit, a bond receipt, a property list and a citation, or ticket) and some instruction to either contact the court, or just wait to be contacted. Most people aren’t at their best when all this goes down, and often don’t remember exactly what they were told. If you hire a DUI lawyer, like me, you don’t have to worry about all this stuff, because it will be taken care of for you. Chances are, though, you’re still freaking out a bit.
It is not unusual for me to be contacted by people who’ve lost right after they get the bad news from the Secretary of State. One of the first things they want to know is if they can appeal the decision. I have to explain that while appealing to court is, legally speaking an option, your chances of winning are somewhere between slim to none, especially for those people who played lawyer and represented themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, but over the course of my 27-plus years as a lawyer, I have NEVER seen anyone who lost a do-it-yourself appeal who I thought had ANY chance of winning an appeal in court.
Anyone facing a 1st offense OWI charge shouldn’t stress out and waste the mental energy thinking about jail, because it’s almost certainly not on the menu. Once you know that you’re not going to jail, then getting through that DUI means avoiding and minimizing the other legal consequences (usually part of probation) that are realistically possible, and there are plenty of those to manage. It’s similar for anyone facing a 2nd offense DUI. The mechanics of what needs to be done in a 2nd offense case are different, but even if your case is a nightmare and you wind up in front of the toughest Judge around, any realistic jail term is measurable in days, not months. No matter what your situation or who your Judge, however, in a 2nd offense OWI case you WILL get stuck on probation for anywhere from 1 to 2 years (18 months is not uncommon). Probation, by its very nature (especially in a 2nd offense case) does put you squarely in the sights of all kinds of things you have to do, including breath and urine testing, classes, counseling, support group meetings, community service and more. This is what we need to work on and, to the extent possible, help you avoid.
Procedurally, a hearing mostly involves answering questions. Depending on which hearing officer is presiding over it, most of the questions will either be asked by him or her, or by the lawyer, instead. Every hearing involves a certain number of the same core questions, although each hearing officer has his or her own particular areas of interest. For example, if a person answers that he or she still goes to AA meetings, one hearing officer may ask something about the steps, a second may want to know how often he or she attends, while yet another may just say “okay,” nod, and then move on to a different subject.
The first thing to understand about a DUI case is that the charge first made against you is not necessarily the charge you’ll wind up with on your record. For now, we’ll forego any examination of the off-chance that the police screwed things up so badly that the whole case against you gets thrown out of court, and focus, instead, on the far more likely situation in which that won’t happen. First offenders are almost always charged with either OWI (Operating While Intoxicated) or High BAC (Operating with a BAC of .17 or greater). Most of these charges, however, can be “reduced” to something far less serious through plea negotiations.
What are those “other” criteria? Here we stumble into things that have developed as interpretations of the license appeal rules. Most of these things are either not obvious or otherwise unknowable no matter how many times you read the published rules. In many of my previous articles, I have called these mostly unwritten requirements “a million little rules.” How many ever there actually are, the larger point is that these are not specific points of law, but rather the interpretation and application of the broader law and rules in the real world.
Sure, it’s great for me to be able to boast that any potential client will only pay me once to get back on the road. Most people correctly understand that to mean that I make my money winning license appeals the first time around, not having to come back next year and do “warranty work.” This effectively removes the risk for anyone who hires me. But it’s not just the client who takes a risk in this transaction; I do, as well, because if I don’t succeed, my work load doubles, and my profit gets cut in half. The way I see it, this provides a great incentive for me to win the first time around, but to also make sure that I don’t accept a case that is not quite ready to succeed. In a sense, it keeps me honest to both my client and myself.