Nobody likes getting a traffic ticket, but one Raleigh company is making life a lot easier for those who do.
The company, named Bernie Sez, has a website and app that is changing the way lawyers find clients.
Rather than the person who received the ticket looking for a lawyer, the app has lawyers looking to represent you.
The creators of the website and Bernie Sez app have come up with an easy way to resolve the problem.
All someone has to do is take a picture of the ticket, upload it to the Bernie Sez website, and in a matter of hours lawyers will be looking to take the case.
When Shannon Bauman received a ticket driving into Chapel Hill, he received a flood of letters from lawyers. Then, Bauman said, he remembered Bernie Sez.
“I thought this feels a lot easier. This is the route I’m going to go with,” he said.
A Chapel Hill lawyer named Taylor Hasting quickly contacted Bauman through Bernie Sez.
The 27-year-old tech savvy litigator said he loves new technology and the ease of using the website. Hasting said it’s now easier to analyze a client’s situation.
“You can answer questions with their driving history and it helps us analyze the client’s situation for their case,” he said.
Bernie Sez CEO Terence McEnally is also a lawyer. He created the app with partner and developer Jim Young.
“Simply by moving traffic tickets and simple misdemeanor cases to e-commerce like this, it makes things so much easier on both sides of the equation,” said McEnally.
Young said the app is incredibly easy to use.
“It’s easy, it’s fast, even a grandma can use the app,” he said.
There are around 2,000 tickets issued every day across the state, according to Young. That equals about 730,000 tickets per year.
The number is even more staggering across the country where approximately 41,000,000 tickets are issued each year.
“If you receive letters from 10 lawyers, that’s 410 million letters [sent] through the [mail],” Young said.
All those letters add up to a lot of wasted time and money.
Bauman said that wasted time and money is simply something he can’t afford.
“It was all online, it was all e-mail and it was super easy,” he said.
“All he did was upload his form, then we took care of everything in court for him,” Hasting said. “We paid his court costs and fines, [now] he doesn’t have to worry about it.”
Bauman’s ticket ended up being an open and shut case, and it all started on a computer screen.
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