Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
We can win your license restoration appeal. Our firm guarantees to win every initial restoration and clearance appeal case we take. Our system has been refined over decades. It works so well that your results are guaranteed. This not only protects the client from losing his or her money, it protects us from ever taking a case that we can’t make into a winner. If we ever do lose, our guarantee obligates us to stick with the case until the person does win. The “guarantee” part means without further legal fees. That makes us as invested as our clients in their success.
It’s a simple proposition: Follow our directions, and we’ll win your license restoration case – guaranteed. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who just have a knack for getting in their own way. They make things harder than they need to be. We encounter this when speaking with someone who wants their license back, but insists on doing it “their way.” That won’t fly with the Secretary of State, and it doesn’t work for us, either. In fact, the point of this article will be a variation on the theme “my way or the highway.” Think of it more as “either our way, or NO highway.”
A recent caller to our office inspired this installment. As we spoke with her, it seemed like we could win her case. She had been sober for a number of years, and might have made a good license restoration client. However, she could not accept the fact that there was no way for us to “speed up” the legal process. Because her child would start school soon, she felt a sudden sense of urgency to get her license back right away. We explained that we could expedite things on our end, but that the Secretary of State works on its own schedule.
I explored this in a recent article entitled “Using Recreational Marijuana will kill a Michigan Driver’s License Restoration Case.” This topic is so important, however, that we need to look at it again. Recently, Ann, our senior assistant, expressed her frustration about recreational pot. She noted that a lot of people who manage to quit drinking suddenly take up smoking weed. It used to be that our biggest “problem” with potential clients was that some of them simply hadn’t completely quit drinking. Now, it’s that they use marijuana.
Unfortunately, this happens more than the reader might imagine. In the criminal and DUI world, this is particularly true when people act out of fear. Too many will sign on with the first lawyer who calls them back after-hours, or over the weekend. In license appeal cases, this often happens when a person chooses a lawyer based primarily on price. Neither of those is the right way to secure quality representation. In fact, they reinforce the notions that a good hiring decision should be explainable by answering the questions posed above.
She found out, once she called our office. We asked her a series of questions to determine whether or not she really had quit drinking. At the end of the conversation, she offered her assessment of our firm, and even suggested we use it as a “jingle” of sorts: We’re not just truth speakers, we’re truth seekers. Specifically, she expressed a pleasant surprise that our questions over the phone mirrored what we had written about making sure that anyone we represent really has quit drinking, and doesn’t use any other substances, either.
In order to win a license appeal, a person must not only be legally eligible, he or she must also be genuinely sober, as well. A hungry lawyer can accept anyone’s case, and take his or her money for it, as well, but precisely because our firm guarantees to win every restoration and clearance appeal case we accept, we can’t – and won’t – do that. Instead, we’ll only accept a case that we know we can make into a winner.
There is more to winning a license appeal, though, than just having quit drinking. A person not only has to prove he or she has quit drinking, they must also prove themselves to be a safe bet to never drink again. Under the rules governing license appeals, these proofs must be “clear and convincing evidence.” A person just can’t file a case and merely claim to have quit drinking; he or she must convince the Secretary of State that it’s true, and that he or she is also genuinely committed to never drinking again. This is where the “story” part comes in, since nobody ever quits drinking because it’s working out so well.
A driver’s license clearance appeal is, in almost every way, the same thing as a regular driver’s license restoration appeal. The primary difference is in the final result: When you win a driver’s license restoration case, you back a Michigan driver’s license. When you win a clearance appeal, which requires proving your residency in another state, the Secretary of State will simply clear the Michigan hold off of your driving record. This will allow the state where you now resides to issue a license. A state can only issue a driver’s license to someone who legally resides within it.
I have written rather extensively about our guarantee, noting, in some articles, how it really serves as both a protection for the client, because he or she will only pay us once for the security of knowing they’ll win, and for us, because once we take a case, we are obligated to stick with it until the person does, in fact, win. Under the terms of our guarantee, if a person doesn’t win the first time, then we have to re-do his or her case until it does. To be blunt about it, we count on earning our money by winning the first time around, NOT having to do the whole thing all over again, for free, as “warranty work.”
After having quite literally read more denial orders than we could ever count, we have seen how one of these 2 reasons underlies virtually every lost appeal. The first issue, and the absolute key to winning a license appeal, is that a person must have honestly quit drinking and has to be genuinely sober. In addition, he or she must also have the ability and commitment to remain sober for good. To be clear, this isn’t about merely saying that one no longer drinks, but rather about actually having quit and having a bona fide intention to remain abstinent forever.
The license appeal process is governed by rules, and they control everything about the process, including how long a person has to wait to file an appeal, the kind of evidence that must be submitted when it’s filed, and exactly what he or she must prove in order to win. The rules do not take into account how much a person may “need” a license, nor do they contemplate how long a person has gone without one. Of course, it’s the need to drive again that usually motivates someone to look into restoring his or her driving privileges in the first place, but to win them back, a person must meet the standards set by those rules.