Crime & Motoring Offences

We take a pride in the quality of our work believing that everyone has a right to professional representation whatever allegations they face. Over 90% of our clients tell us they are “very satisfied” with the Department’s overall level of service and would recommend us to someone else and more than 95% of our clients felt that the outcome of their case was better, or the same as, we had advised them it was likely to be.

We provide a free 24 hour, seven days a week service to help anyone arrested and detained at a police station. We will see you at the police station and provide expert advice to try and secure your early release and will do all we can to try and stop you being prosecuted.

We are committed to the provision of Legal Aid criminal defence work. The majority of our work is dealt with under the Legal Aid Scheme and all of the Department’s offices hold Legal Services Commission Criminal Contracts. If you are not eligible for Legal Aid we can act for you for a guaranteed fixed fee.

The special expertise Coodes’ Criminal Department has in defending all types of criminal charges also benefits the firm’s business clients who increasingly face prosecution for regulatory offences. We can advise you on any investigation your business faces and are able to attend any formal interviews with you to ensure your interests are fully protected.

The Criminal Department has considerable experience in successfully defending prosecutions by bodies such as DEFRA, VOSA, the Environment Agency, Cornwall Council, and the Health and Safety Executive.

These cases receive the same scrutiny and skill as the Department gives to the more well-known criminal offences and if there are any loopholes to be found we will find them.

We always provide detailed and realistic advice with a broad commercial awareness complemented, where necessary, by the support of the firm’s commercial specialists and experts in other areas of law.

If your business is being investigated or prosecuted our early advice could save you time and money and may even prevent a prosecution being brought at all.

Our charges for dealing with this type of work are the same as for any criminal work we deal with. Although Legal Aid is not available to limited companies it may still be if you are a sole trader or a partner in a firm.

All three solicitors in our Criminal Department have extensive experience of motoring law, with each of them providing advice or dealing with such cases on an almost daily basis over the last 20 years. All of them have conducted and successfully defended at trial all types of motoring prosecutions ranging from no insurance, through speeding offences to drink driving. They have also dealt in the Crown Court with many of the more serious motoring prosecutions including death by dangerous driving. In the event that there is no legal defence to the charge, we may still be able to save your licence by arguing either special reasons or exceptional hardship on your behalf. Magistrates do not always appreciate defendants trying to do this alone and each of the department members have regular experience of successfully putting forward such arguments.

Conviction and Disqualification are frequently not inevitable, provided that you have the correct representation. Road Traffic Law is complicated and it is vital you seek the specialist advice we can provide from the outset. Each of the Criminal Department’s solicitors can provide you with that specialist advice based on their experience in an initial confidential telephone consultation for a fixed fee of £37.50, plus VAT, to tell you if we can realistically help and what the cost will be. We operate the same fixed fee basis for motoring matters as we do for all criminal offences and our charges are set out in Our Charges section below.

Those fees include taking your instructions, advising on the evidence and likely sentence, and where specified taking statements from any non-expert witnesses, attending court with you on every occasion your case is listed for hearing, fully conducting those hearings on your behalf and advising you on the merits and cost of any appeal. Those fees apply no matter how long the case takes or how much work is involved.

All work that is done under our Fixed Fee Motoring scheme is undertaken by the solicitors in the department who are each supervised by Mr Gregson, and his work in turn is supervised by Mr Andrews. Most cases are concluded at the first hearing after we are instructed but where matters are contested there may be one or possibly two further hearings. It would be unusual for a matter to last for more than three months after that first hearing

We cover all courts in Devon and Cornwall,  including our local Magistrates’ Court in Bodmin. If you have a Summons to appear in Bodmin Court or if you’ve received a letter from the police about a possible prosecution, phone us now on 0800 328 3282.

We will act for you under the Legal Aid Scheme whenever that is available.

Everyone is entitled to free Legal Aid when they are interviewed as a suspect at a police station or anywhere else by the police. Legal Aid is also available to everyone (other than limited companies and those individuals with a net disposable household income of more than £37,500 pa) whose case is sent to the Crown Court for trial, although you may have to pay something towards that depending on your financial circumstances.

For Magistrates’ Court proceedings you are entitled to Legal Aid if the charge you face justifies it and you qualify financially. That can include imprisonable or technically complicated motoring offences. We will give you free advice about the likely availability of Legal Aid.

If you do not qualify for Legal Aid we will act for you on a fixed fee basis for all the work we undertake in the Magistrates’ and/or Crown Court. Many household and motor insurance policies also include cover for legal costs. It is always worth checking the policy wording of your existing insurances to find out if this is an option in your case.

Our fees for dealing with all the necessary work in the Magistrates’ Court are:

1. £37.50 to provide initial telephone advice on motoring prosecutions.
2. £100 to consider the prosecution paperwork for our advice on the strength of the prosecution you face and the likely sentence if you are convicted (this fee will be credited if you then instruct us to go on to deal with the proceedings on a private fee basis).
3. £300 for attending an interview under caution by an agency other than the police.
4. £450 for advising you and putting forward mitigation on an initial guilty plea at one hearing.
5. £750 for a guilty plea to an endorsable motoring offence where an exceptional hardship argument is to be raised to try and avoid, or reduce, a period of disqualification.
6. £2,250 for a matter where a not guilty plea is entered which is listed for trial, or for a special reasons hearing on a motoring offence to try to avoid a disqualification or endorsement, or an appeal to the Crown Court against conviction.
7. £400 to deal with the Magistrates’ Court proceedings in a case that is sent for trial to the Crown Court.
8. £1,000 for any other case (including committals to the Crown Court for sentence and appeals against sentence to the Crown Court).
9. Where a matter is listed for a trial, or any contested hearing, to take more than one day, or where the trial or hearing actually lasts more than one day, the £2,250 fixed fee is increased by £750 for each of those days whichever is the longer. If a guilty plea case is not finalised at one hearing then the £450 fixed fee is increased by £200 by each additional hearing we attend.

VAT will be added to those fees which cover all the necessary work for the type of case concerned and are guaranteed to apply irrespective of the amount of work we actually do. Any expenses incurred, such as experts’ reports or travel costs from our office to court or to site visits (including applicable VAT) will be added to our bill.  We will ask you to authorize and pay in advance for any expenses totalling over £100 before we incur them.

The sum of £500, or the fixed fee if less, is payable towards our fees before the first court hearing or within 7 days of our request for it, if later. The balance of the fixed fee due to us is payable in full 28 days before the listed trial date or within 7 days of the matter’s conclusion, if earlier.

If you are acquitted or the prosecution decides not to proceed further we will apply to the Court for a Defendants’ Costs Order. This is an order providing for a contribution towards this firm’s final bill to be made from Central Funds. That contribution will be based on Legal Aid rates only and so it is important to appreciate that this is unlikely to cover more than a quarter of our fees and you will still have to pay the rest. Limited companies are not entitled to a Defendants’ Cost Order and so would always have to pay our fee in full even if they are not convicted.