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Every day in the Las Vegas valley, hundreds upon hundreds of traffic citations are issued by various law enforcement agencies such as the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the Nevada Highway Patrol, the Henderson Police Department, and many others. Traffic citations are issued for every kind of imaginable offense, for speeding, for failure to yield, for inattentive driving, for failure to maintain a travel lane, for not having proof of current registration, for having windows that are "too" tinted, and myriad other reasons. Police have even been known to issue traffic citations even to bicyclists and pedestrians (ie., jaywalking).

When a person is issued such a ticket, it will not be long before they begin to wonder whether it would be "worth it" to hire an attorney. Some local law firms even aggressively advertise that they are "ticket-busters" etc. Many people decide not to hire an attorney because they erroneously believe that the expense of hiring a lawyer is not justified since they believe they can handle the ticket themselves.

It is is true that an individual can represent him or herself for a traffic citation. In fact, before I became a lawyer, I represented myself on a citation as a pro se litigant and managed to get my traffic ticket reduced to a parking ticket. But I had to go traffic school, which took time and cost money. Now that I am a lawyer - and just observed an attorney session at the Las Vegas Justice Court yesterday afternoon, I am aware that the system is set up such that a lawyer can nearly always get a better overall result than an unrepresented person.

For example, the Las Vegas Justice conducts periodic "attorney sessions" wherein local lawyers and a judicial officer meet to resolve a massive amount of traffic citations all at once. This allows the attorney to charge a smaller fee to the client since the attorney can potentially handle multiple client's traffic tickets at the same session; and it allows the court to more efficiently process a large amount of citations in a shorter period of time than would otherwise be possible. At these sessions, the general outcome for most traffic citations is that the ticket is "reduced" to a parking ticket with NO NEED FOR THE CLIENT TO GO TO TRAFFIC SCHOOL.

Thus, there are five reasons why it is a good idea to hire a lawyer to fight your Las Vegas traffic ticket:

(1) If you hire a lawyer, you probably will not have to go to traffic school. Traffic school eats up your time and costs you money. Saving you from the time, hassle, and expense of traffic school alone may be worth the $100 or so charged by a lawyer.

(2) If you hire a lawyer, you have an even better chance of getting your ticket dismissed completely (not just reduced to a parking ticket, but dismissed entirely). This is because the lawyer may be able to find an error or other issue regarding your ticket that you may not have recognized. Of course, most of the time the ticket is well-written, and the lawyer will not be able to get it dismissed entirely, but the lawyer will still most likely be able to get it reduced to a parking ticket without the need for traffic school.

(3) If you hire a lawyer, you won't need to go to court. Going to court yourself can eat up your whole day. If you don't get paid time off work to do so, don't forget to consider missed income when evaluating the fee charged by the lawyer. Even if your court day is not one of your work days, aren't the better ways you could spend your time then being a defendant in court? Especially if you are a tourist, the fee charged by the lawyer is likely less than what it would cost you to travel to town just to fight your ticket.

(4) If you or a lawyer don't fight your ticket, you will have to pay the whole fine. Getting a ticket reduced to a parking violation generally results in a lower fine.

(5) If you just mail in the whole fine to the court and thus effectively plead guilty without bothering to fight it yourself or through a lawyer, you will have this "conviction" for the traffic violation on your record. Such a conviction may result in higher insurance premiums, and the denial of some employment opportunities.

This article was written by Daniel J. Reed, Esq., for more information, please visit this website: http://www.accidentawardslasvegas.com