The Cost of Losing Your License Appeal
There are two real costs tied to a Michigan driver’s license restoration appeal: the fixed cost of winning, and the much larger cost of losing your license appeal and having to start over.
The Cost of Winning
The cost of winning is fixed and known in advance. Our fee for handling a license restoration appeal is published on our fees page, along with the cost of the required substance use evaluation. We’ve won about 98% of the license restoration and clearance appeals we’ve taken on the first attempt, and because we back every case with our first-time win guarantee, that published fee is the only cost you’ll ever pay us for this case. Even in the rare instance that doesn’t win right away, we simply keep working, at no additional cost, until it does.
The Real Cost of Losing Your License Appeal
The cost of losing is a different story, and it’s rarely just financial. If you hire an attorney without a guarantee and the case doesn’t win, you’re often looking at paying that same fee all over again for a second attempt — on top of another year of waiting, another year of relying on someone else for rides, and another year of the frustration that comes with an appeal denied.
We’ve represented plenty of clients who tried this before — some who represented themselves, some who hired a lawyer who came up short — and the pattern is the same. They come to us after that loss precisely because they don’t want to risk going through it twice.
We especially feel for clients who have genuinely stopped drinking, done everything “right” by their own understanding, and still lost. Being denied can feel like a rejection of their sobriety itself, when in reality it usually means the case wasn’t built the way Michigan law requires it to be built — not that the sobriety wasn’t real.
Why These Cases Are Harder to Win Than People Expect
Trying to navigate a Michigan driver’s license restoration appeal without guidance is a bit like finding your way through a maze in the dark. There’s a long list of specific requirements that has to be met before your case even gets a fair look: the substance use evaluation has to be completed the right way, the letters of support have to be written and notarized correctly, and everything has to be submitted in the proper form. Before the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office of Hearings and Administrative Oversight (OHAO) will even weigh the merits of your case, all of those requirements have to be satisfied first.
Miss one of them, and the case is over before it really started.
If your evidence does clear that initial review, a hearing officer will then decide whether you’ve proven — by clear and convincing evidence — that your alcohol or substance use problem, including recreational marijuana, is under control and likely to remain under control. That means establishing the date you last drank or used, and convincing the hearing officer that you’re unlikely to ever use again. Sobriety is the necessary starting point, but sobriety alone has never been enough to win a case on its own.
This is an area where experience specifically in addiction and substance use makes a real difference, not just experience in a courtroom. Attorney Jeffrey Randa completed post-graduate coursework in addiction studies specifically because so much of what determines whether a case wins or loses comes down to understanding that piece correctly, and every attorney on our team is trained to build a case around it.
OHAO hearings are now conducted remotely over Microsoft Teams, which means our clients don’t need to live near our office, or even in Metro Detroit, to work with us. Driver’s license restoration is something we handle for clients throughout Michigan, and clearance appeals for clients living anywhere in the country.
Weighed against each other, the fixed, one-time cost of hiring a firm that guarantees the outcome is small compared to the real cost of losing your license appeal: another year without a license, another year depending on other people to get where you need to go, and — for many clients — the added expense of paying an attorney’s fee twice. Our guarantee exists because we’d rather absorb that risk ourselves than ask our clients to.
If you’ve already tried an appeal on your own or with another attorney and it didn’t go the way you hoped, we’d encourage you to call and talk it through. There’s no additional cost to trying again with us, and no reason to keep facing this process alone.