Why Hire A Private Defense Attorney?
There are a multitude of reasons why you should hire a defense attorney. Perhaps the most basic reason is that when your livelihood is at stake, you want to ensure that someone with the proper resources, legal knowledge and experience can best represent you.
Another aspect is that with many criminal cases there is the potential for civil ramifications. For example, when you are charged with a DUI in the State of Illinois, you are being pursued by a two headed monster: on the one hand, the State of Illinois through the local prosecution is prosecuting you criminally (the State’s Attorney or District Attorney) and the Secretary of State (currently Jesse White, as of 2012) is pursuing you civilly (statutory summary suspension). In many instances, even if you qualify for the public defender, they cannot represent you with reference to the civil side of it (SSS).
Also, a plea of guilty in the criminal case can be used against you in a civil case. If you are tempted to see if you can qualify for a public defender, consider this: the public defender’s office is typically not allowed to counsel you on civil matters. Additionally, their area of expertise is the criminal arena.
The bottom line is that no attorney can guarantee any result. But you want to ensure that your attorney can guarantee you that they will do everything in their means to effectively defend your case- both criminally and civilly. Contact our office today for a free consult.
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Mineral Rights in Oil and Gas: What You Need to Know
The traditional conception of real property ownership was that a landowner owned his plot of land along with a column of dirt down to the center of the earth and a column of air up to the sky. This conception no longer holds true. It is now common, especially in Southern Illinois, that when one purchases a piece of real property, the purchaser obtains title to the surface of the land, but not the column of dirt beneath it. Very often, the mineral rights to a piece of property have been severed, and the owner of the mineral rights has the authority to mine them. When mineral rights are severed in the conveyance of a piece of property, the severance creates two distinct and separate interests in the land—a surface estate and a mineral estate, either of which can be conveyed, devised, or leased. When this occurs, the owner of the surface estate is subservient to the owner of the mineral estate. This means that he may not interfere with the activities reasonably necessary to extract the minerals from underneath his land. While title to metallic minerals vests2 at the time of conveyance, title to oil and gas does not, due to the tendency of these types of minerals to move around under the earth. Rather, mineral rights in oil and gas do not vest until they are actually discovered. Thus, mineral rights to oil and gas are better conceived of as rights to exploration and, very often, they are mined pursuant to a mineral lease rather than outright ownership. These leases are subject to the same rules as...
When Can Your Neighbors Legally Take Your Land?
When Can Your Neighbors Legally Take Your Land? There is a concept in real estate law that is little known outside the legal world, whereby a trespasser can gain legal title to someone else’s land. The “trespasser” in these cases is usually a neighbor but, nonetheless, someone who does not own your property can become the legal owner by his use of it through a concept known as adverse possession. Claims of adverse possession are creatures of common law in Illinois, and require a showing of several elements. In order to legally take title to land, a person’s use and possession of the land must be: Hostile (against the right of the true owner and without permission) Actual (he or she exercises physical control over the property) Exclusive (In the possession of the trespasser alone and no one else) Open and notorious (the trespasser must use the property as the true owner would without hiding the occupancy) Continuous for a period of 20 years Adverse possession claims are especially common in rural areas (like most of Southern Illinois) as opposed to towns and cities because it is often more difficult to determine where one piece of property ends and another begins. Example of Adverse Possession Let’s take a look at how a hypothetical adverse possession case might play out. Assume there are two property owners—the Smiths and the Joneses—who own neighboring farms. Mr. Smith erects a barn that he believes is on his property, but is actually 15 feet over the property line on the Jones’s farm. Mr. Jones says nothing about this, and Mr. Smith uses this barn as...