You Received a Pink Summons in New York City in the Name of a Corporation or Business
Certain businesses that do business in New York City, especially businesses that require the use of commercial vehicles are likely to have periodic need for legal services to deal with pink summonses.
Typically, commercial pink summons cases relate to the multitude of commercial vehicle regulations, federal, state, and local. On their face, some of these tickets can carry staggering fines and many are actually crimes. Fire code violations and other administrative summonses can also result in a business receiving a summons.
Where the corporation believes it should have been the recipient of the summons rather than an individual employee, it is frequently possible to arrange for a "corporate substitution" so that the individual employee or officer of the corporation need not be the focus of the charges. Often the Government and the Court will agree to the substitution upon negotiated settlement of the summons.
Corporation Must Have a Lawyer
Sometimes, the driver of a vehicle, or other employee is given the ticket in his name, but more often the tickets are written in the name of an organization. If the ticket is written in the name of an organization, that means that under New York law, an attorney must appear. Even if the corporation is really a one person operation and one person is the president, CEO, and everything else, the corporation must be represented by a lawyer.
The owner of a corporation is not allowed, under the law in New York, to appear in court even for his own corporation. If a non-lawyer appears in Court and attempts to appear on a summons issued in the name of a corporation, the Court will not permit it and will require that an attorney to appear at a later date.
Shalley and Murray regularly attends to corporate summons matters in New York City summons courts, including courts located at 346 Broadway in NYC, as well as in Queens and the Bronx. Corporate clients with a periodic need for legal services may qualify for a corporate discount off our individual flat rate of $500.
When faced with pink summons matters, corporate officers will often instinctively turn to their corporate or business lawyers to "deal with" the pink summonses. Many of these summonses, however, are considered criminal matters and can carry substantial penalties.
Therefore, many corporations contact Shalley and Murray to help. As a New York City criminal defense law firm, Shalley and Murray can bring more than 20 years criminal defense experience to bear. Compared with the more typical criminal defense case in New York City, corporate pink summons cases, of course, may not be as complex. Our corporate clients take some comfort from our criminal defense experience in order to minimize their exposure to liability on coporate pink summonses.
As experienced criminal defense lawyers, we are in a position to provide an efficient, extremely cost effective legal solution to deal with summonses in courtrooms that are often far more familiar territory for us than for the average business lawyer who has little or no experience in criminal court.
Resolutions to Corporate Pink Summons Cases
In many cases, these corporate pink tickets can be negotiated in reasonable ways that avoid the staggering fines that can be associated with some summonses.
To the extent possible, we recommend that our clients resolve any issues that may have actually required attention prior to the court appearance. Depending on the nature and number of summonses, resolving the issues ahead of time can often reap rewards in terms of the final resolution.