Georgia DUI Defense
Head Thomas Webb & Willis, LLC

Client’s Bill of Rights

in Criminal, DUI and
Traffic Offense Cases
  1. Our firm staffs our office 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. When you are in trouble, tomorrow is too late. SM
  2. Our firm will handle your case as though we were representing a close personal friend or family member in making pre-trial and trial decisions and recommendations for your case. As we would advise a family member on important personal matters, we will tell you what course of action we believe best serves your interests at all phases of the legal proceedings.
  3. Our firm and its employees will treat you with respect, privacy and dignity throughout your court case and beyond. Your confidentiality is of paramount importance to our firm and your private matters will be protected. If we do not have employees that speak your native language, we will use a translation service in order to be able to communicate with you.
  4. Assuming that your case is not already scheduled for pre-trial motions or trial, or on a trial calendar due to a speedy trial demand that can require us to be prepared for an immediate trial, for all criminal, DUI or traffic offenses, when you retain an attorney from our firm by phone call, e-mail or in person, you have the right to change your mind and obtain a full refund of the retainer fee you have paid us within 10 calendar days.
  5. Our firm will charge you fixed (flat) rate fees for your criminal/DUI/traffic case, and after we reach a fee agreement, will put your fee agreement in writing. Our fees are payable in increments set forth in the written fee contract, based on the progression of the case and the corresponding amount of time we must invest in the case to reach that phase of the legal proceedings.
  6. Our firm will thoroughly investigate your case by use of one or all of these methods (as the case facts dictate) (a) interviewing fact witnesses, (b) locating potential expert witnesses for trial, (c) coordinating the hiring of private investigators and (d) locating and acting on your behalf to employ expert witnesses when needed at various stages of the case. We will keep you informed of your options for reaching a negotiated plea at each critical phase of the litigation, prior to the next increment of fees coming due.
  7. When information or witnesses are critical to your case, our firm will obtain and file subpoenas and will file targeted motions, discovery documents and other written pleadings designed to require the prosecutor to disclose important case information.
  8. Throughout the progress of your case, our firm will keep you fully advised of important case developments, such as offers to settle or offers for you to plead to lesser charges if and when such offers are communicated to us by the prosecutor. Copies of important court documents and correspondence will be sent to you by our office when we receive them.
  9. Once your case has been fully investigated, if no offer to reduce or settle the case has been received from the prosecutor that meets your approval, our firm will provide you with an evaluation of the favorable and unfavorable aspects of the prosecutor’s evidence if the case needed to be resolved by a bench (non-jury) trial or jury trial. This assessment will be provided to you either (a) in writing or (b) verbally by the attorney assigned to your case. In the assessment, your attorney will outline your prospects for achieving a non-trial disposition of your case, in one of the three methods set forth in the next numbered paragraph.
  10. Our stated objective in representing you on your case is to obtain the best possible outcome for you, in light of the prosecution’s admissible evidence against you. To this end, our firm pledges to strive to achieve one of these objectives:
    1. Dismissal, acquittal or elimination of all or part of your charges by any legal means available;
    2. By means of thorough case preparation and negotiations with the prosecutor prior to trial, obtain an agreement for the reduction of your most serious charge or charges to a less serious (reduced) misdemeanor offense or local ordinance; or
    3. Eliminate all charges except one for purposes of mitigating (reducing) any long-term impact of the conviction of multiple charges on your permanent criminal record.

If one of the three foregoing non-trial case dispositions cannot be achieved, you may ask that your case be reviewed by one of our partners as a means of providing a “second opinion” about the propriety of any non-trial plea disposition that does not meet one of the three objectives shown in this paragraph. You will always have the right to go to trial, if that is your wish.

Because you have the final decision of whether your case goes to trial, you will be free to reject any recommendation that our firm makes and to pay our firm the final increment of fees for us to proceed to trial on your behalf, so long as you acknowledge to our firm, in writing, that (a) you are aware of the potential repercussions and potential range of punishments that could follow a negative outcome at trial; and (b) that your decision to proceed to trial and to reject the prosecutor’s plea offer is independently made by you after rejecting our firm’s non-trial negotiated plea recommendation.