Specialist motoring offences solicitor Paul Loughlin discusses the work undertaken by our team here at Stephensons. Paul highlights the importance of obtaining legal advice when facing a motoring prosecution and talks about our approach to these kind of cases.

If you are facing prosecution for a motoring offence and would like to speak to our specialist team call us on 0333 323 3760.

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Video transcript

In terms of motoring offences, we offer a wide range of different services, varying from straightforward guilty pleas to try and minimise a penalty as far as possible, or even quite complex not guilty proceedings, where the overall aim is to look to avoid any penalty whatsoever. Motoring offences covers a wide array of different areas. It can be anything from a simple, factual matter, involving an allegation of careless driving, for example, right up to quite a complicated technical defence, relating to procedural issues in a drink driving matter.

Often, we'll have people who will be at risk of losing their licence as a result of, either an individual speeding offence, or by virtue of totting up to 12 penalty points. Once you get to 12 penalty points, you will be automatically liable for a six month disqualification, unless we can convince the court otherwise, and that's probably one of the most common guilty pleas that we can offer. The most common matter after that would be enquiries relating to drink driving matters. Again, we deal with a high volume of guilty pleas for that one. One of the areas that have increased in terms of enquiries is in relation to drug driving. In March, 2015, the laws changed in that respect, and moved away from looking at the level of impairment, more towards looking at a specified level. Whether an individual had exceeded that level. As a result of that, we've seen quite an influx of inquiries relating to that area.

In terms of penalties for each offence, the court are guided by sentencing guidelines. They can be interpreted in different ways, though, and it's important to make sure that any representation, or, certainly, initial advice can deal with interpreting those guidelines. At Stephensons, we actually have a drink driving penalty calculator on our website that can provide your likely range, in terms of penalty. It's always, then, important to follow with more specific advice to see whether that penalty can be avoided, or where we can focus on mitigation to make sure you get the lowest possible ban.

Even if your belief is that you'll be penalised come what may, you can go to court thinking, "Well, my penalty's going to be my penalty, irrelevant of what's said," and that's not the case. They'll look at factors about the offence, but they'll also look at factors about the offender, and if they're not presented to the court, then it won't be taken into consideration, and it's important that the court have a full picture, in order to help them make a proportionate and fair assessment of what should follow.

In terms of how fees would work for a case like this, it's important from where we're coming from to offer clarity to the client, so we have a range of different fixed fee packages, depending on what you're looking to instruct us in relation to. Make sure that you know, at the outset, what you can expect from the service, and we know what we need to deliver from the very beginning. We may have situations where we'll have clients who will want us to use whatever we can in our power to ensure that they come away from this completely unscathed.

We can look into that, certainly. We have to make sure that we abide by the rules of the court, primarily and foremost, but there are ways where people who believe that they are looking at a certain conviction, there are technical defences that we have to explore, really, we have a duty, if we know about these issues, we've got a duty to explore them with the client. It's dangerous to go down a route of simply taking a blanket approach for each case, so, actually, what we do at Stephensons is we offer an investigation approach. It's very important that the case is fully investigated when a technical or procedural defence is being considered.

The idea of speaking to a solicitor, for a lot of people, is quite a daunting thought. Pick up the phone. It's important to make sure that you've got advice before you go to court. It's much more daunting to turn up to court without any idea of what's going to happen than it is to pick up the phone, speak to a solicitor who knows what they're dealing with. I, myself, have been dealing specifically with motoring matters now for in excess of 10 years. We have partners here who have been dealing with cases like this for way more than that. We've got experience in abundance. We have a team who can help. Knowing what to expect can take a lot of the stress away.