The clock started the night you were arrested.
Not the court date on your ticket. A separate 15-day deadline that decides whether you keep your license — and almost nobody is told about it.
Talk to Andy or Chris directly. Free, confidential, and you will leave the call knowing your deadline, what you are actually charged with, and exactly what our flat fee would be.
Free consultation. No obligation. Nothing is signed in the room.
Text an attorney directly. Not an intake desk.
These are Andy and Chris’s own numbers. Most people arrested at 1am would rather type than talk, so text them — you will get a lawyer, not a call center reading a script.
These direct numbers receive text messages only. Calls are answered on the main line at (314) 949-1515. Text messages are not a secure or confidential channel — send your name and a callback time, not the details of your case.
your license
in writing first
prosecutor & public defender
consultation
What to do, and what not to do
None of this is legal advice about your case — it is the general guidance we give people who call us in the first week. The right-hand column is where most of the damage gets done.
Do this
- Find the Form 2385 tonight The Notice of Suspension the officer handed you. The date printed on it, not your court date, is what the 15-day clock runs from.
- Write down the whole evening while you still remember it Where you were stopped and why the officer said they stopped you. What you were asked to do. What you said. How long passed between driving and the test. Memory of that night degrades fast, and details you think are irrelevant often are not.
- Note whether you asked for a lawyer — and what happened next In Missouri you are entitled to twenty minutes to try to reach an attorney before deciding on a test. The Missouri Supreme Court has held that consultation must actually be private. Being handed a phone in a room full of officers is not the same thing.
- Keep everything The citation, the towing paperwork, bar or restaurant receipts, rideshare records, texts from that night. Timestamps matter.
- Say so immediately if you hold a CDL The threshold is .04, half the normal limit, and even an administrative action with no conviction can disqualify you for a year. That changes the whole strategy.
- Tell your lawyer the unflattering parts We cannot defend around a fact we first learn about from the prosecutor.
Do not do this
- Do not wait for your court date The license deadline runs long before it. The Department of Revenue’s own words: if you do not request a hearing within 15 days, the hearing will be denied and no further appeal is possible.
- Do not plead guilty at the first setting to get it over with Where a municipal judge is licensed to practice law, the right to a trial de novo does not extend to a case resolved by a guilty plea. Ten minutes of convenience can close off every option you had that morning.
- Do not assume a municipal ticket does not count Missouri counts city and county ordinance violations as intoxication-related traffic offenses. It is a prior for the rest of your life — and so is a suspended imposition of sentence, because the statute keys on being found guilty, not convicted.
- Do not post about it Not the arrest, not the night, not a joke about it. Prosecutors read social media, and so do insurers.
- Do not talk to police to clear it up There is no version of that conversation that helps you, and you cannot un-say it.
- Do not drive on a suspended license It is a separate charge, and it converts a manageable case into a much worse one.
- Do not assume a dismissal gives your license back Missouri law says the Department’s action is independent of the criminal case and that the disposition of the charge does not affect the suspension.
A former DWI prosecutor and a former public defender.
Chris LaPée served as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney before returning to defense, and later focused his practice on DWI defense at a dedicated DWI firm. He knows how the State builds these cases because he used to build them.
Andy Morris spent years as a public defender, carrying the caseload most lawyers never see. He co-founded the firm in 2024 so that the quality of someone’s defense would stop depending on what they could afford.
The firm is two attorneys. The person who quotes your fee is the person who handles your case.
Photograph does not depict an actual client or case.
Three things people ask first
What does this cost?
One flat fee, quoted at the end of a free consultation and put in writing before you decide anything. It does not change because your case took more hours than expected, and you are not billed for phone calls. What drives the number is the charge, the court, your record, and whether a test was refused — which is why we quote it after talking to you rather than publishing one figure that would be wrong for most people. See exactly what it covers.
Is it too late if I was arrested more than 15 days ago?
The administrative hearing request is gone, but your criminal case is not, and neither are the other routes — a restricted or limited driving privilege, and everything that happens in court. Call anyway. The worst outcome of the call is that we tell you honestly where you stand.
I blew over the limit. Is there anything to defend?
Frequently, though nobody can promise an outcome. A breath result is only as good as the stop that produced it, the operator’s permit, the maintenance and calibration record on the instrument, and whether the testing followed the methods Missouri requires. Those are the first things a former DWI prosecutor looks at.
If you do nothing else today, find that notice and count fifteen days.
Then call us. The consultation is free whether or not you hire us, and if we are not the right firm for your case we will say so.
Counted from the date printed on your Form 2385, not from your court date. It is the one deadline in a DWI case that cannot be repaired afterwards.