Beneath all the evidence and legal issues that make up a Michigan driver’s license restoration case is an actual person. In the previous article, I made clear that while being sober is a necessary prerequisite to being successful in a license appeal, being able to prove that sobriety is what’s really necessary to win. As I noted there, you have to genuinely be sober in order to prove it, and there’s more to proving it than just saying so. In essence, proving sobriety comes down to summarizing some of the more important points of your recovery story.
I often point out that one of the dangers of any “do-it-yourself” case, or going with some lawyer who doesn’t concentrate in this field, is that it’s so easy to miss any of the many technical requirements – something I often call “a million little rules” – that govern license appeals, While understanding the rules is necessary, the way to really win a case is to plug the details of a person’s transition from drinker to non-drinker into the legal framework they create. No matter what, every sober person has a very real recovery story, whether they know it or not.
This goes much deeper than all the technical and legal stuff. Anyone who has honestly quit drinking knows that there’s a lot more to it than merely “quitting.” The changes a person makes when eliminating alcohol from his or her life are profound. Even though many people have never thought of their journey to an alcohol-free life as any kind of “story,” it certainly is. Our job, as driver’s license restoration lawyers, is to sit down with our clients, ask the questions that draw out the details of that experience, and then fit them into the template of a winning case.