Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
I win back Michigan Driver’s Licenses, and I Guarantee that, if I accept your case, I’ll win it back the first time around. I am passionate about what I do. About 75% of my day-to-day work is dedicated License Appeal matters. I consider myself a genuine Michigan Driver’s License Restoration Lawyer. While I try and maintain a high standard of dignity and professionalism, I have, on a few more recent occasions, found myself frustrated at what seems like the growing number of Lawyers who claim to “do” License Restorations and pretend that they somehow specialize in this field. In this article, I want to explain a little bit about what’s different about me.
In the last few years I’ve won more License Appeals than anyone I know. In the course of any given month, I have written and published more useful information about the Michigan Driver’s License Clearance and Restoration process than you can find, cumulatively, on the rest of the entire internet. My blog has over 350 informational articles; I publish 2 new ones every week. 146 of them, to date, are about Michigan Driver’s License Clearance and Reinstatement matters.
I’ve seen some legal sites with a long page, or even a few pages of general information about License Appeals, but all of it ends with some kind of “call me now for a free consultation” line. No other site comes close to providing anything near the amount or quality of information about the License Appeal process that you will find right here. Click around the Driver’s License Restoration section of my website or this blog and see for yourself.
Some legal sites have a section detailing their owner’s “wins.” I have too many wins to ever list, much less detail. Each year I win around 98% of more than 100 Driver’s License Restoration cases that I handle. Instead of a list of wins, I provide a Guarantee that I will win: I Guarantee that, if I accept your case, you’ll win your License back the first time we try. You cannot do better than that…
I set the bar at it’s highest in terms of the results I promise to produce, but I also set the bar high in terms of who I will accept as a Client. I REQUIRE that a person be really and truly Sober before I will undertake a License Appeal on their behalf. This rather clearly separates me from the rest of the herd, and leaves me standing alone, holding what amounts to a red flag. This requirement explains how and why I can offer a win Guarantee, and it says a lot about me, and why I’m different.
A Client recently explained that he had decided to hire me to handle his License Appeal, knowing that my Fee was higher than some others, precisely because I was the only Lawyer whose site he had found that clearly stated that he would only accept a case for a genuinely Sober person. To him, and to me, requiring that a person meets the minimum legal (and inherent ethical) requirement that a person be committed to not drinking in order begin a License Appeal just seems like a given. After all, the whole goal of the License Appeal process is to prove that a person’s alcohol problem “is under control, and likely to remain under control.” This is absolutely required by Law. How could I just be willing to accept a Fee from anyone who will pay it without inquiring the person’s past abstinence and their commitment to remaining Sober? Don’t you think that a person’s Sobriety (or lack of it) should be the very first thing a Lawyer asks about? Shouldn’t a Lawyer make sure he or she can actually win someone’s case before taking their money?
I do, and I do.
When you consider that “Sobriety,” and all that it means, is really at the heart of a License Appeal, don’t you think a Lawyer handling these cases should have some expertise in alcoholism (or an alcohol problem) how people recover from it? Everyone knows the simple things: If you have a problem, you should get help, and that usually means some kind of counseling, treatment, and/or AA. But what does it mean, in the first place, to have an alcohol problem? What is the difference between being an alcohol abuser and being alcohol dependent? How are these problems properly diagnosed? What happens after such a diagnosis is made? How is a person’s readiness and receptiveness to treatment assessed? What are the different modes of treatment, and how does a Counselor decide which one is best for any given person? Most of all, at least for a License Appeal, how can you tell if such counseling or treatment has been successful? How can you measure, and ultimately prove, Sobriety?
I have long touted that this has been a field of study of mine for nearly 20 years. Yet being a master of something really mean being a master student of it. A person can (and never should) stop learning. In keeping with that, I am pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Addiction Studies. This is a program open only to those who have already earned a graduate (Master’s or Doctorate) degree. Just like most Patent Lawyers have technical degrees in things like engineering, or chemistry, or biology, you’d sure hope that someone who works in my field, the central component of which is the existence of and the recovery from a substance abuse problem or problems, would have specific and advanced education in that.
I do.
And there’s more. Two thirds of chemically dependent patients have a psychiatric diagnosis in addition to their chemical dependency. Most of the time, these co-morbid psychiatric disorders are substance-induced, and go away as a person becomes Sober. Statistically, 42% of alcoholics display depressive symptoms that go away within the first two weeks of abstinence from alcohol.
Sometimes, that depression does not go away. Depression is the most common secondary diagnosis related to chemical dependency. I see a fair amount of anxiety and bi-polar disorder, as well. Sometimes, these conditions require medical management. This is where my expertise comes into play in a major way. I can generally say that almost everyone reading this who has had a prior License Appeal and disclosed a secondary diagnosis such as an anxiety disorder, a bi-polar disorder, or depression, and/or anyone who disclosed the use of medication for any of these conditions lost their case. That’s probably why you’re here. And the Hearing Officer who Denied your Appeal probably made a big deal about your diagnosis, and/or your medication. If you had a Lawyer, you probably wonder how he or she could have missed all this…
I won’t.
This is part of what makes me different; welcome to my world.
Lately, it seems to have become “trendy” to include some reference to “license restoration” in your web address. I can imagine the day when someone will have a URL like www.imthecheapestlicenserestorationlawyerwiththemostadsandthelongestnamesocallmefirst.com. Worse yet, there are some operations out that use multiple, different site names related to DUI and License Restoration in an attempt to have a name that coincides with every conceivable search term you can plug in.
I don’t.
Instead, I just focus on doing good work and winning my cases. I like to explain what I do, and how I do it, so I keep a pretty good web site, and a really good blog. Another Client of mine joked and said that if he had been a Lawyer, he would have studied my blog articles and learned to be a License Restoration Lawyer. That made me wonder if I wasn’t a bit too generous with the information I share.
Then, I realized, another huge part of what makes me different is that I am up front and open about what I do. When I go online, I want to learn something about the subject of my inquiry. When I get to a page that’s all sales pitches, I hit the “back” button right away, because before I buy anything, I want to learn about it. I want to compare what I read here with what I read there, and eventually draw my own, and hopefully educated conclusion. Years ago, a very big mens clothier used to say, “An educated consumer is our best customer.” He was right.
Accordingly, I provide as much information as I can about the License Appeal process, yet I don’t have to fear anyone copying me. Anyone could take apart a BMW and see what it’s made of, but that doesn’t mean that they could build one! For all the clinical and legal knowledge I have, there is a certain “instinct” that I have about winning License Appeals, that helps make me different. This is no doubt just inherent when a person is really good at something. That instinct is probably what drives some people to their chosen field, and certainly drives the success a person has within it. Think of it this way: A home run king in baseball probably understands the mechanics of his swing, and what he does when he smacks a ball into the stands, but he doesn’t really have to think about it, because it comes naturally.
In Part 2 of this article, I’ll continue explaining what I think makes me “different” as a Michigan Driver’s License Restoration Lawyer, and why I think those qualities are so important. I’ll look into how and why my background and my experience accounts for my overwhelming success in winning License Appeals the first time around, and how that all culminates in my first time win Guarantee.