No More Unwanted Visitors
Video Transcribed: Using cease and desist letters to confront light trespass in Oklahoma. I’m James Wirth, a lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’re doing a series of videos related to cease and desist letters and how they can be utilized, and this one deals with light trespassing.
So if you own some property, you’re renting some property and you have somebody that’s continually going on your property in a way that you are not comfortable with or that you do not like, cease and desist letter may be an option for you. So first off, if this is a stranger, could be somebody dangerous, something like that, you’re probably just going to want to call law enforcement and reported as trespass if they’re refusing to leave. However, if this is something that is maybe not necessarily dangerous, but it is an annoyance and it happens over and over again over time, then that is where you may want to look at a cease and desist letter.
So a cease desist letter is a letter sent generally from an attorney or a law office. You put it on the letterhead, you have the attorney sign, and you sign it by certified mail, so you have proof that it was served upon them and that it shows how serious of a matter this is because you’re paying for certified mail, or you go a step further and use a process server and that way you’ve got proof that they’ve received it and it really packs a powerful punch knowing that you hired a process server to send that. It lays out how they’re violating the law by trespassing. That is illegal. They’ve been on notice because you’ve told them not to do that, but they continue to do it and it tells them to cease and desist that activity. Stop trespassing. Or it notes that there could be consequences if they don’t do so.
Those consequences could be filing a police report requesting criminal prosecution, or it could be filing a civil lawsuit against them and requesting damages or declaratory judgment, ordering them to stop doing that. Or could be in a case like this of trespassing, maybe a protective order is appropriate. In any case, rather than going straight to litigation, oftentimes it makes more sense to do something that’s a little cheaper and faster in way of a cease and desist letter and see if you can get it resolved that way, even if you can’t get it resolved that way, that can also, the fact that you did that process, you gave them an opportunity to cure, they refused to do so. That can help lay the groundwork for your civil litigation that comes later.
So is a cease and desist letter right for you regarding the person that is trespassing on your property? Well, you’re probably not going to get that from this video. You need to talk to an attorney about that privately and confidentially to see how this information fits with your specific scenario to get that scheduled with an Oklahoma lawsuit attorney at my office and go online to makelaweasy.com.
