3d Cir. · 2003
Delvoye v. Lee
Hague Convention "habitual residence" — the Third Circuit's controlling decision; argued by founding partner.
Family · International Custody
A former judge. A father–son trial firm. Fifty years of New Jersey practice — from criminal defense and DWI to estate planning, family, and civil litigation.
Hague Convention "habitual residence" — the Third Circuit's controlling decision; argued by founding partner.
Standard Statement procedural defect; Standard Statement reading found inadequate. Charge dismissed.
Negotiated downgrade to disorderly persons after motion to suppress identification evidence.
Defended decedent's testamentary capacity against undue-influence challenge in two-day trial.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each matter depends on its own facts; the outcomes described above are individual to those engagements and do not predict the outcome of any future matter. ATTORNEY ADVERTISING.
Indictable, disorderly persons, and expungement representation in every New Jersey vicinage.
Alcotest 7110 challenges, refusal-statute litigation, IDRC and license-restoration counsel.
CDL violations, reckless driving, point reduction, plea-reformation in every municipality.
Auto, premises, fall-down and product cases tried — not solicited and settled cheaply.
Divorce, custody, equitable distribution and Hague Convention international-custody work.
Wills, trusts, powers of attorney, advance directives and estate administration.
Hoboken and Jersey City rent-control, eviction defense and warranty-of-habitability work.
Contract, real-estate, partnership and shareholder disputes — resolved by trial when required.
Each matter is staffed by one of two named partners — never an associate filtered through an account manager.
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 — 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 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.
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.