Too often I speak with people who have recently received a speeding or traffic citation and when I ask them what they did with it, the most common response is, “I just wrote a check and sent it in.” This is the absolute worst thing that you can do!! When you pay a ticket like that, it goes on your record as a conviction, which gets reported to the Secretary of State, which your auto insurance company sees, which ultimately raises your insurance premium. Further, if you get three convictions on your record within a year, your license is suspended!
What I always tell my clients to do when they get these kinds of tickets, is to check the box on the back of the ticket that says you want to plead not guilty and request a trial by judge. Within a few weeks, you will receive a letter from the Court with a new trial date. Then on that date, you can appear in Court with or without an attorney like myself (preferably with), where you can try to get supervision and pay a fine in exchange for a plea of guilty. If you or your attorney can accomplish this, then the citation does not go on your record as a conviction, it is reported as supervision. This does not get reported to the Secretary of State and your auto insurance company will not see this. Yes, it is true that you will pay high court costs and a fine and depending on how fast you were going, you might have to do traffic school. You will also pay an attorney fee, but all of these costs will most likely cost you less than the money it would cost you if you got a conviction on your record.
When you go to traffic court with an attorney, your case gets called before everyone else in the room who is there without an attorney. Also, attorneys know what is fair and what is not fair, where most other people do not know this. The long and the short of it is that these days, with the court costs being as high as they are (usually more than $200.00), it just does not pay to speed. The fact that you could have gotten somewhere 5-10 minutes earlier is definitely not worth the $300.00-$1,000.00 that it could cost you in fines, costs and attorney fees!!