AMOL

The Association of Motor Offence Lawyers was founded in May 2007 by Jeanette Miller, the senior and managing partner of Geoffrey Miller Solicitors.

To explain why it is so important for a client to instruct an expert in motor offence law it is helpful to use an analogy of using a GP to perform brain surgery. You simply would not even dream of such a thing. Many general criminal lawyers are capable of dealing with a very straight forward factual motoring defence but the vast majority of general criminal lawyers do not have the expertise to employ tactics and knowledge we have gained through years of experience.

The organisation’s aims are to ensure that members of the public have a clear way of recognising true expertise in the highly specialised field of motor offence defence. The organisation was set up in response to a growing number of instances where expertise has been claimed by lawyers who simply do not possess it. This has led to many clients being incorrectly advised and in our view, wasting their money aswell as possibly being made a victim of a miscarriage of justice!

The most extreme example of this was when in March 2007 a solicitor who shall remain nameless set up a new website claiming to be a motor offence expert. His website featured a flashy picture of a nice sports car and the text on the site claimed he could expertly represent anyone facing prosecution for a motoring offence. However, when we looked closely at his site we saw that he had simply copied the text of the Geoffrey Miller Solicitors site (which has been redesigned since then in response to his and other less extreme copycats.) This particular solicitor had not only blatantly copied our site but he had failed to remove our name from the text which featured several times throughout the description of his services. When he contacted the copyright lawyer who was instructed by us to close the site down and recover damages on our behalf, the solicitor immediately apologised for what had happened and said he knew nothing about motoring offences! He also agreed to close down the site and pay sizeable damages to us.

You may be thinking why would someone go to those lengths to copy a site like ours if they did not know how to deal with the clients they may attract through it. In comparison to other areas of criminal law, motor offence defence is a lucrative and niche market which is not reliant on legal aid. Many general criminal lawyers are facing financial difficulties as a result in changes in the way legal aid pays solicitors. Some firms are looking to branch into other areas and this has led to an increase in solicitors seeking to claim expertise in motor offence defence.

Prior to the launch of AMOL there was no way of telling if a solicitor was a true expert. Flashy websites can be created by anyone with a knowledge of basic criminal law and this makes it difficult to select the right firm to serve your interests. Now, there is a very easy way of recognising who is an expert and who is not. The members of AMOL have either been invited to join the organisation because of their proven track record in the industry or because they have passed very stringent criteria which have been set to ensure that all members are sufficiently knowledgeable about the issues that commonly arise in motor offence defence.

We are proud to not only have membership of this organisation, but have been instrumental to its creation as we believe it will not only be a crucial guide to clients seeking to select the right representation, but it will also lead to improvements within the industry as members of the organisation share their experiences and tactics.