From criminal defense and DWI to estate planning and family law, we appear before every Superior Court and municipal bench in the State — with the discretion of practitioners who have sat on both sides of it.
Admitted to the New Jersey Bar in 1976. Served as Ridgefield Municipal Court Judge for fifteen consecutive years and argued the seminal Hague Convention custody decision Delvoye v. Lee. A trial lawyer's trial lawyer.
Admitted to practice in 2012. A second-generation trial attorney whose criminal-defense and police-accountability work has been cited in The Record, NJ.com and NJ Law Journal. Concentrates on criminal, DWI and traffic matters.
A New Jersey DWI charge is unlike a traffic ticket. It is, by statute, a non-criminal violation prosecuted in municipal court — but the consequences are punishing: license forfeiture, ignition-interlock installation, mandatory alcohol education at an Intoxicated Driver Resource Center, and insurance surcharges that compound for years. A second offense invites two days of mandatory jail. A third invites one hundred and eighty.
Avery & Avery has defended Alcotest, refusal and per-se charges in every county of the State. Robert Avery presided over hundreds of municipal-court matters of this character before founding the firm; John Avery has carried that institutional knowledge into a generation of cases that turned, more often than not, on the procedural fitness of the State's evidence.
Every DWI defense begins with the discovery file. We obtain the Alcotest 7110 calibration records, the operator's certification, the ten-minute observation log, the body-worn-camera footage and the dispatch CAD. From those documents we identify the pressure points — the cases where the State's procedural compliance is incomplete, the cases where the underlying stop will not survive scrutiny, the cases where the breath sample itself was unreliable.
The instrument's reliability depends on documented twenty-minute observation, calibration within the prescribed window, and an operator certified at the time of administration. Each of these is, by statute and case law, a precondition to admissibility — not a presumption.
A refusal conviction under N.J.S.A. 39:4-50.4a requires the State to prove unequivocal, voluntary refusal. Confused responses, ambiguous statements, and procedurally defective Standard Statement readings all create defenses recognized by New Jersey case law.
Where conviction is the realistic outcome, our work shifts to mitigating it: ignition-interlock minimization, IDRC sequencing, hardship-license eligibility and the correct calculation of statutory enhancements. The difference between a properly negotiated sentence and a defaulted one is measured in years.
Robert W. Avery has practiced law in New Jersey for fifty years. Admitted to the Bar in 1976 after graduating from Rutgers School of Law, he founded Avery & Avery the same year — and has tried matters in every Superior Court vicinage and a substantial majority of New Jersey's municipal courts in the half-century since.
From 1986 through 2000 he sat as Municipal Court Judge in Ridgefield, Bergen County — a fifteen-year tenure during which he presided over thousands of DWI, traffic, and disorderly-persons matters. The discipline of that bench informs every aspect of his subsequent trial work: the procedural literacy, the patience with witnesses, the unsentimental reading of the State's evidence.
Mr. Avery is best known appellately for Delvoye v. Lee, the 2003 Third Circuit decision construing the habitual-residence prong of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The opinion remains controlling authority in international-custody litigation across the United States.
He concentrates his practice today in serious criminal defense, complex family matters with international or interstate dimensions, and estate litigation. He accepts a limited number of new matters per year.