We spend a lot of time talking with people and the first question I want to know is why is your license revoked or suspended? Sometimes people don’t know. Sometimes people don’t want to admit and they think, “Well, I’m just not going to tell them about that ticket I got in Florida somewhere when I was on vacation.” Our consultations are free and confidential at our office because we want to encourage you to tell us everything, and the point of having a lawyer is to kind of help you navigate what can be a very complicated system.
We travel North Carolina. I’m not saying we’re going to go to every jurisdiction. Sometimes we refer cases to other attorneys. If it’s an eight hour drive away, we may work with or consult with another attorney or refer you to them. If it’s in the Charlotte Metro region, Rowan, Iredell, Gaston, Meck, Union, Stanley, we got some lawyers we can travel around. The key is to try to figure out what’s causing the revocation, see if we can clear that up.
I don’t encourage just paying things off. I see this a lot, and if you see on our blog posts, this is an issue I address. Please, please, please, before you do anything, talk to a lawyer, whether it’s us or someone else. Don’t just pay things off. It can exacerbate or make worse an already bad situation. It could be really, really expensive. I recently did a blog post on this where I think the person asking the question on a message board, wasn’t a client, but something like a thousand dollars in restoration fees and costs and things like that.
We want to figure out what’s causing a revocation, see if we can clear that up, and then we want to see if you can get your driver’s license back because sometimes, it’s not a guarantee or a promise, but sometimes we’re able to get a prosecutor, the district attorney’s office, to offer something else other that Driving While License Revoked, because if you get a Driving While License Revoked during the period of revocation or suspension, it’s going to extend the period of time that your revoked or suspended.
Then there’s the worst type of offense. It’s Driving While License Revoked Impaired Revocation. Now, NorCar General Assembly has done a lot to try to clear the courts of some of these more administrative DWLRs, but the one area they’re not messing around with is Driving While License Revoked Impaired Revocation, meaning that you’ve had a DWI, alcohol related type of revocation or suspension. Maybe you’re in administrative revocation due to willful refusal. Maybe it’s the initial 30 days. A lot of different ways this can happen, and yet you still drive. Boy, they don’t mess around with this, because if you’re in a wreck and someone gets hurt or killed, you’re going from a pretty serious misdemeanor to possibility of a felony real, real, real fast.
While the General Assembly has been, I think frankly generous in trying to make it a little bit easier to navigate the system and clear up records, they are not playing with Driving While License Revoked Impaired Revocation, and we’re oftentimes trying to figure out how to keep our clients on this side of the wall, as my partner Chris McCartney likes to say. We like to keep you on the outside, at home, working, as opposed to the other side of the wall in jail, or prison, as the case may be.
Give us a call. Consultation’s free. We will be more than willing to take a look at the overall record, give you a global perspective, if we can. Maybe we can travel the different jurisdictions, fixing these different types of tickets, meaning, when I say fixing I mean trying to resolve them one way or the other. There’s no fix [inaudible 00:58:48], and then see what we can do ultimately to get you back on the road and holding that little plastic license that is so, so valuable that people don’t realize how valuable it is until it’s taken away.
I see a lot of these cases with older people, people my age that have gone years, and years, and years, and they say, “Enough. I want to just clear this up. I didn’t take it seriously before.” We do a lot of these, so we’re willing to sit down with you and try to work it out. I really think that the system in North Carolina is trying to do that more as a whole, but you got to be careful about how you do it.
We get calls from people to say, “I called DMV and they said do this and it caused this,” or a police officer, even though they’re writing a ticket, is trying to help you out, and maybe you get some advice that they don’t know all the factors, and it’s caused an additional period of revocation or suspension.
We’re here to help. That’s why our telephone number is 704-342-4357, and I hope to hear from you. Have a great day.