One of the reasons people send their friends to us is because when it comes to driving law, we like to win. Some might view our competitive nature with concern. It’s true that it’s perfectly acceptable for lawyers to be disinterested in the outcome of the case provided they are competent and do their best. For us, however, it’s not that simple. The nature of the cases we handle means that we must be unusually creative. We are invested in our client’s cases and the direction of the field of driving law which is why we like to win.
In 2008, when we opened our Vancouver office, Paul had already been defending driving cases for nearly a decade. Although he started defending all criminal cases, the demand for his legal skills was more and more from people who got in trouble with the police involving driving. In 2010, when Kyla Lee came aboard, a conscious decision was made to focus more on driving cases. As Kyla says on her podcast, “driving law drives the law.” The term “driving law” was one we coined in 2010 to describe the particular work that we do.
Driving law
What is driving law? The law related to cars and driving was never referred to a “driving law” until we gave it that name. Kyla recognized that a great deal of the most important court cases engaging the Charter of Rights involve fact patterns of the police investigating a driving case. Criminal lawyers who would normally deal with all sorts of cases, would defend the occasional case involving driving and often the court decision would change the law.
Kyla concluded that by becoming the super lawyer in this area of law, pulling it all together, she would be better placed to advance the overall state of the law. Just like a brain surgeon is better positioned than a general surgeon to develop innovative brain surgery techniques, by focusing in on driving law, Kyla became best positioned to develop innovative defences. We quickly recognized the advantage of Kyla’s approach.
Administrative Law, Provincial Offences and Criminal Driving Cases
What you do on the road is governed by provincial administrative law, provincial offence law, i.e. traffic tickets, and federal criminal law. All of these areas of law intersect and impact how the police deal with traffic stops and accident scenes. For us we realized we needed to zero in on all three areas of law to get the best results for our clients for their particular case and to correct the law so it would be fairer.
If you’re an administrative law lawyer, it’s likely that from time to time you will fail to spot a criminal law issue that impacts the administrative law case. If you only defend only 90-day driving prohibitions, you may miss the underlying flaws of the police stop for a Motor Vehicle Act offence.
This is where the creativity comes in. Kyla was a key figure in the earliest Charter challenges to the IRP law, partially because she was already a skilled criminal impaired driving lawyer. Her seminal case of Buhr v. The Superintendent of Motor Vehicles (https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/SC/13/14/2013BCSC1443.htm) took criminal law principles regarding impaired driving evidence and turned it around to apply in a 90-day Immediate Roadside Prohibition administrative DUI case. And for her that was just the start.
In 2014, we exposed a fundamental problem with the Roadside Breath Testers (Approved Screening Devices) because we knew how to find the proof from having defended speeding tickets.
In the end, we stay creative because the onus is on us to make the law fairer for every driver by changing the area of law that we defined. We like to win because we like to drive the law. That’s our thing.
Driving law is an area of law we created because it was the best way to describe the connection between administrative law, provincial highway regulation and criminal charges that deal with driving.
If you have a driving case, we have a friendly team of dedicated driving lawyers ready to help you.
Give us a quick call. We only need three things to get started with your driving law case. And yeah, we like to win.