First Things to Do After Being Arrested for Michigan OWI

Patrick, let’s start at the beginning.  Someone is arrested and charged with some type of alcohol related offense.  What is the first thing that person should do?

First thing they should do is find a good lawyer.  The reason I say that is because the area of drunk driving law has become so complex over the last decade that the general practitioner really is now not well equipped to defend these types of cases.  Not only do you have to understand the very complex nature of the law itself but it’s also necessary for the lawyer to have a very good understanding of the science behind breath and blood testing, as well as the metabolism of alcohol.

Patrick, how does someone find a good lawyer? There are thousands of lawyers competing.  You go to the Yellow Pages and you’re going to find probably in the Detroit Metropolitan area hundreds of lawyers who say, “We do defensive drunk driving”.   How do you sort this out?

That’s very true.  The best way to do that, to the extent that you’re not too embarrassed to do it, is too ask your friends and family for a recommendation.  If you know anybody who maybe is a lawyer who’s in the field that can make a recommendation to you, that would be a good place to start.  Today in the technology age that we live in the Internet has actually become a very good way to do research.  It’s a good way to research anybody that has been recommended to you. 

You can type their name into Google and see if you can find out any information.  What you want to do is look at their background.  You want to look and see what type of things they’ve done to become specialized in this area of law.  Have they taken any advanced education classes that are given to lawyers via lawyers to learn more about how to defend these cases?  Do they have  any particular background in the area of the hard sciences so that they can understand breath and blood testing?  What have they done?  Have they published anything?  Have they lectured other lawyers? 

Those are some of the things to look for. You can also check those references by actually asking the people in the court.  Believe it or not, you can go up to the clerk at the court and ask them for a recommendation. 

Would they do it? 

They will, but there is one issue to that.  People like to recommend their friends.  Their friends may not be necessarily the best lawyer.  It’s a good place to start, you can double check and see is this person that the court has recommended happen to be the same person that my lawyer friend recommended?  Do their credentials seem to be good when I look on the Internet. 

Then of course, you want to talk to them and interview them.  Interview them just as you would interview a doctor or somebody else that was going to perform an important function for you .  You want to make sure that you double check and maybe sit down with 2 or 3 lawyers and hear what they have to say and see how they present themselves.

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