Steve Palmer: All right, Lawyer Talk. Off The Record, on the air. DUI 360, taking a 360 degree approach at, ah, DUI and OVI. I say OVI because Ohio is OVI. Others have DUIs. Basically, we're talking about the same thing. Drunk and drinking, dry drinking and driving. Um, and the 360 Series is designed to sort of give you all angles. You get it? 360 degrees, all angles of OVI law representation. From my perspective, what you can expect as somebody who might be charged with an ovi. Uh, so what I want to talk about today is should I get a lawyer if I have a DUI or an ovi? Uh, the answer is unequivocally yes. If you can afford it, you absolutely need to get a lawyer. If you can't afford it, then you should certainly talk to the court about getting a public defender, uh, or a court appointed attorney. Because, look, here's what I tell people. Um, lawyers can't always beat your case. Lawyers can't always win. Uh, but that's not all you're getting with, with an OVI representation. You're getting help through the system. Because if you try to navigate these treacherous waters on your own, you're going to be asked questions by judges, by prosecutors, by court staff that you don't know the answer to. You probably don't even know what they're asking you. Um, it's about as complicated as any area of the law. Uh, we have administrative issues related, uh, to driver's rights and driver's rights suspensions. We have constitutional issues like think are, uh, the police allowed to pull over my car in the first place? Can they order me out of the car? Can they have me do field sobriety tests? Did they have enough probable cause to arrest me? There's a lot of constitutional law, both at State levels and all the way up the federal levels, on DUI stops and arrests. Then you have scientific issues. Um, so what I mean by that is, uh, we have breath testing science, we have blood testing science, we have urine testing science. And this stuff gets complicated. But even if you don't have all those things, even if you don't care about all that stuff, uh, a lawyer can help you navigate through the process. So when you're asked what you want to do with the case, you're going to get an answer, you're going to get help, you're going to get a shepherd through the problem. And even if you're just going to go plead guilty and take your lumps, a lawyer can help make sure you only get the minimum sentence allowed and not more. They can make sure that, uh, if you are pleading guilty, it's because you have to or you should not, because you just don't know what to do. So the question, should I get a lawyer? The answer is yes, you should get a lawyer. You should get the best one you can afford. That doesn't mean you have to spend the most money on a lawyer, because there's a lot of attorneys that just charge more and there's some that charge way too little. Uh, if you're hiring a lawyer, here's what you do. Get a referral if you can research that individual. We have Google and all sorts of online resources now, uh, and that's a great resource. And then talk to the lawyer. Meet with the lawyer on the phone or, uh, in their office, or at a minimum, uh, on the phone and get an understanding and make sure you're comfortable with that attorney. Uh, and then go with it, Run with it. You won't regret it. So, DUI 360. Should I get a lawyer? The answer is yes. Get a lawyer. Get a good one. And, uh, that way you'll know at the end of the day you did what you had to do, whether it was fight the case, plead the case, or something else. Lawyer Talk, off The Record, on the air. DUI360, at least until now.