IRP Petition update – clients with the prohibition stayed

As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, we received word from the Attorney General’s office late yesterday that they’re changing their position with respect to our IRP clients with the prohibition stayed.

We have many clients for whom we filed Petitions in court to challenge their IRP decision under the first version of the scheme. For a number of clients, we also obtained court orders staying (suspending) the driving prohibition pending a resolution in the Sivia case.

We did something smart in retrospect. Where possible we also advanced arguments in many of the Petitions concerning administrative law errors we identified in the OSMV tribunal decisions.

Up until now the Attorney General’s office took the position that the stays would not be consented to unless our client also had arguments on the substantive issues in the individual case. This presented little difficulty for us because, as we said, we did something smart and had already crafted our Petitions with this in mind.

So what has happened now is that, as of 6:15 p.m November 19, 2012, the position of the Attorney General is that:

1. claims constitutional grounds for relief,
2. from an IRP served under the original scheme (that found wanting by Sigurdson J and now before the CA), and
3. has a stay order in place, such that there is a portion of the 90-day prohibition yet to serve,
   

So there you have it. Thankfully this will reduce the amount of work we need to do on each file to extend the order, and consequently the legal fees will be significantly less for each of our clients.

We have completed the work on a number of files for our clients with the prohibition stayed. We expect to have the last of the draft orders to the Attorney General’s office no later than Thursday afternoon, and filed in court as quickly as possible after that.

If we had the IRP prohibition stayed for you with a court order back in 2011 and you haven’t been in touch with us in the last two weeks, please call us.

Finally, we’ve received calls from people who had other law firms acting for them regarding their Petition. Some people have reported to us that their lawyer threw in the towel when the July letter came from the Attorney General’s office.

If you’re in this situation, don’t despair. Give us a call and we can handle it for you. In at least one case so far, after we took conduct of the file, the Attorney General’s office consented to the relief sought in our amended Petition.

We will provide more updates in the coming days.