From the criminal docket to the equity bench, Avery & Avery has appeared in every Superior Court vicinage in the State — and in the discretion of practitioners who have sat upon both sides of it.
The Third Circuit's controlling decision construing the "habitual residence" prong of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Argued by founding partner Robert W. Avery.
Indictable matters in Superior Court · disorderly persons in Municipal Court · expungement petitions under N.J.S.A. 2C:52.
Alcotest 7110 challenges · refusal-statute defenses · IDRC and ignition-interlock counsel.
CDL violations · reckless driving · point-reduction work · plea-reformation in every municipality.
Auto, premises, fall-down and product liability matters tried — not solicited and settled cheaply.
Divorce · custody · equitable distribution · Hague Convention international-custody work.
Wills · revocable and special-needs trusts · advance directives · estate administration and litigation.
Hoboken & Jersey City rent-control · eviction defense · warranty-of-habitability litigation.
Contract · real estate · partnership and shareholder disputes resolved by trial when required.
Admitted to the New Jersey Bar in 1976. Argued Delvoye v. Lee in the Third Circuit. Forty-six years of trial practice in every county of the State.
Admitted to practice in 2012. Cited in The Record, NJ.com and the NJ Law Journal for criminal-defense and police-accountability work.
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. A first conviction may carry license forfeiture, ignition-interlock installation, mandatory alcohol education at an Intoxicated Driver Resource Center, and insurance surcharges that compound for years. A second conviction 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, body-worn-camera footage and the dispatch CAD. From those documents we identify the pressure points — cases where the State's procedural compliance is incomplete, cases where the underlying stop will not survive scrutiny, 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 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 each 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.
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 — an opinion that 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.