Not long ago, Rick Silverman sat next to a woman on a plane. She asked him what he did for a living. "I'm a lawyer. I fight traffic violations," he told her. "You mean tickets," she said. "Don't you just pay those things?"
The vast majority of people do. A cop stops you and writes you a citation for going 52 in a 35. You did it, and you know it. You might plead your case to the officer, ask for a break, give him a sob story, even argue with him. Almost always, you drive away with that piece of paper in your hand, get home, toss it on the counter, look at it and gulp at the hefty three-figure fine.
But just because it appears you've been nailed dead to rights on the road doesn't mean you have no options. You can represent yourself in traffic court (it's not like you're being tried for arson, after all): present photos, diagrams and other evidence, cross-examine the officer who wrote the ticket, explain to the judge why you did (or didn't) commit the offense. You can also ask for leniency.
Or you can retain Rick Silverman, or someone like him who specializes in fighting traffic violations. You are forgiven if you didn't know that such an animal existed. In fact, Silverman, 45, is just one of a dozen or so traffic ticket lawyers in the Bay area. (His website is floridatrafficguru.com.) He represents citizens who choose to contest citations for speeding, running red lights, fender benders and other moving violations. He stands up for as many as 60 clients a day, most of them not in court, and questions police behind the scenes and in front of a judge, argues the driver's side of the story and works to whittle down the penalty — to get the points tossed out, the fine reduced or save someone from taking the dreaded defensive driving school.
All for $99, if you get cited in Tampa. (Going to court for you all the way out in Plant City will cost you double. A Pinellas ticket, $250.)
He offers no guarantee of a satisfactory resolution but routinely comes away with one.
"If you have a lawyer, he's going to be able to organize the way you make your arguments," Silverman says, "throw out arguments that don't mean anything, pick the ones that do, and the lawyer knows the procedure of the court."
In particular, lawyers know how to challenge police documentation of any electronic devices that may have been used to measure your speed.
It has be a rigged game, right? A police officer stands at the podium and says he clocked you speeding and produces the radar number. Open and shut.
But watching a few hours of traffic court presided over by hearing officer Bill Foster dispels that notion. About 70,000 cases cross Foster's bench in a big, featureless courtroom in the Floriland Office Center off Busch Boulevard. He dispatches them like an ace short order cook, flipping through papers, multi-tasking, processing information, hearing testimony, issuing instantaneous decisions.
Foster has a poker player's demeanor: not an iota of flamboyance; he speaks in a monotone, swearing people in with Evelyn Wood efficiency.
"Tell d' truth, nun'b'd'truth?"
A woman stands up with her teenage daughter at one podium, the police officer at the other. The cop testifies that he caught her going 68 miles per hour in a 40 mph zone and that he was 258 feet away. She counters that no way she was going that fast — maybe five, 10 mph over the limit at the most; the flow of traffic wouldn't allow it.
"You're aware that you're admitting that you were speeding," Foster says flatly. The woman returns a blank look. "I'll give you the 45 to 50," Foster continues. "I won't fine you for the 68."
Foster's ruling has reduced the woman's fine from about $300 to $125 and probably shaved her points from four to three.
Tyrece Bennett, 31, does a lot of driving for his job as an installer. He's been accused of making a left turn from the right lane on Kennedy Boulevard. Bennett stands at the podium with his attorney, Mark Stallworth, and explains to Foster that he had no choice, that he was heading directly into a construction site and had nowhere else to go. The police officer's version of events comes off as a bit hazy. Foster listens to it all and then weighs in: "I live near there and know about that construction. I'll let you go this time. But next time if there's any doubt, don't make that kind of turn."
Bennett says later that he paid his lawyer $99, money well spent. "It's you against the law officer," he says. "The lawyer brings a reputation with the law. It's not just you against the judge and the officer. It evens the playing field."
It doesn't go so swimmingly for all traffic violators. A man cited for speeding tries to make the kind of solipsistic argument that usually bombs in traffic court:
He had no intention of speeding because he wasn't in a hurry; he was on his way to a sports bar to watch the SEC championship game. It was raining and he was driving on a grated metal bridge. "It was not logical for me to drive like that," he says. "If I'd-a done that, I'd-a swerved on a wet metal bridge. I drive a 4-cylinder car. Sixty-two miles per hour? I can't get up that fast off a light."
"I find you in violation," Foster says. "See the court."
Meanwhile, Rick Silverman is working the room, schmoozing, back-patting, calling nearly all the police officers by name. It's readily apparent that the cops kind of like this short, stocky guy in the dark-gray suit, white shirt and gold print tie who exudes a brash New York style.
Silverman quietly confers with a Tampa patrolman who says he left the calibration statement for his laser device in the car. The cop returns without the documentation and the ticket gets discreetly kicked. "You don't want to embarrass anyone," Silverman says.
In the hallway between sessions, the traffic guru confers with a state trooper (who said he couldn't speak on the record without clearance from his public information officer). They engage in a rapid back-and-forth that's both businesslike and collegial. The trooper wrote a woman a ticket for going through a red light.
"By the way, do you have a specific recollection?" Silverman asks.
"Yes," the trooper replies. "I was right in back of her."
"Did she have plenty of time to stop?"
"Yes. To be honest with you, she was very nice, but she was in blatant violation."
So what's this little dance all about? "I was essentially pre-trying the case," Silverman explains. "You know the old adage, 'Don't ask a question in court unless you know what the answer is.' The officer had a sharp recollection of the incident. The client wasn't there to refute, although I'm not sure it would've done much good. I determined that if I tried the case and he testified the same way, we would lose. At that point, I changed my tack from winning the case to seeking leniency."
No law school student sets out to be a traffic court attorney. Silverman sort of ended up here. He moved to Miami from Oceanside, N.Y., at age 10, graduated from University of Florida and went to law school at University of Miami with designs on being a criminal defense attorney. In the late 1980s, he landed a job with a law firm in Fort Lauderdale. "It was the tail end of the cocaine cowboy era in Miami, and we represented a lot of drug dealers and mules," he recounts. "I was new, and they didn't trust me with the heavy lifting, so they gave me the lighter stuff. The drug dealers would get traffic violations and they'd send me to traffic court. I started to get to know people and get a feel for it."
After a couple of years, the office folded, and Silverman was offered a job at the Ticket Clinic, the first traffic defense practice in Florida. He honed his craft for more than four years, and when his wife, Michele, was offered a medical research job in Tampa, he ended up opening a Ticket Clinic branch here. "It was a high-volume concept with a lot of radio advertising, and it didn't work," Silverman says.
In '95, he hung out his own shingle as a traffic attorney with a more conventional, word-of-mouth approach. (To this day, he doesn't shower traffic violators with direct-mail pleas for their business.) A few years later, Ch. 13 reporter Eric Seidel approached Silverman about bringing cameras into the courtroom and chronicling him during a traffic ticket trial.
Silverman understood the risk: Lose and look bad on TV. It's a risk he took. "That night I won, not one, but two cases," the attorney says. "The next day, my phones rang off the hook. They're still ringing today."
Silverman is a sole practitioner (with an office staff of two) and occasionally farms out a ticket defense to a lawyer that he trusts. But mostly it's just him with a stack of files, expediting cases with a quick mind and a deep-held understanding of traffic statutes, how traffic court works, whom he's dealing with and what the likely outcome is for just about any case. He does DUI defenses and occasionally other criminal cases, but the large majority of his practice is devoted to traffic violations.
Silverman makes it clear that he's no miracle worker. While he has an amiable relationship with most police and the court, he's not a ticket fixer. The attorney maintains that there is more fairness, more justice in the system than people expect and that it is often worthwhile to contest a traffic ticket. Or as fellow lawyer Mark Stallworth says, "People overestimate the hassle involved in fighting it."
Silverman says he will turn down a client if he thinks that, given the facts, there is little he can do to help him. But once the client is on board, he will first attempt to win the case outright. "I determine whether the officer can prove the charge against my client," he says, "before I would think about a disposition."
The biggest factor when it comes to mitigating the penalty for a ticket is a client's driving record. "A good benchmark regarding a level of leniency is to look back three years," Silverman says. "If you've had more than one citation in three years, you're going to have a more difficult time."
The traffic guru admits that at times he feels strait-jacketed. "I ask my wife from time to time, 'Am I going to be doing traffic tickets until I'm in my 60s?'" Silverman muses. "It can get monotonous, of course. And unless you do this on a heavy-duty scale, you're not going to get super-rich on it. I do enough that I think is manageable for myself."
To provide perspective, Silverman has kept every thank-you note he's ever gotten. Also, despite the specialized nature of his practice, or perhaps because of it, Silverman is recognized as a top-flight legal practitioner who has lectured other lawyers on trying traffic violations and chaired the Florida Bar's Traffic Court Rules Committee.
And perhaps most important, while he's not often involved in major legal scraps, he does get to argue cases. Silverman tells the story of a rich personal injury attorney he once worked for who would come to the office in a custom velour track suit and "dial for dollars" — negotiate on the phone with insurance companies.
"That would drive me insane," Silverman declares. "If I ever leave the courtroom, that means I'm not practicing law ever again."
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2008.