Corporate attorneys have long ridiculed traffic law as a back alley of the profession, but more lawyers are making it a practice. In Dallas 25 to 30 lawyers call traffic law their specialty, up from just a couple in the mid 1980s. While the Manhattan Yellow Pages didn't show any traffic attorneys 10 years ago, today there are about a dozen firms specializing in such cases there, and half of them are listed in the Yellow Pages. But I didn't have the correct social pedigree. . . Traffic lawyers who often toil without secretaries or even computers, have to be experts in traffic-law minutiae.
Practitioners insist that defending the ticketed is honorable and important.
These are rights that we cherish and we uphold. Meanwhile, the auto-insurance industry complains that traffic attorneys are putting back on the streets reckless drivers who haven't paid for violating the law. Indeed, according to studies by the National Safety Council, excessive speed is a factor in a third of all vehicle accidents resulting in deaths and a fourth of all injury accidents. Since most traffic infractions are misdemeanors, the work of traffic lawyers goes largely unnoticed. But traffic-lawyer John R. Farris Jr. of Santa Ana, Calif., won fame in 1992.