Next Steps After Emergency Protective Order Granted
Let’s say you’ve already had a protective order granted on your behalf for an emergency basis. What are your next steps? Hi, my name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa protective order attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing family and criminal law for almost eight years now, and I want to help you make law easy by talking a little bit about what to do after you’ve been granted an emergency protective order.
So I get a lot of clients that come in and they say, hey, so I went to the court, I filled out this paperwork, a judge gave me this order, I don’t know what to do now. That’s great, but that’s just the very first stage of the process. Now we need to figure out how to take that emergency protective order and push it through to a final order of protection.
Gathering Evidence and Witnesses
So here’s what you’re going to need to do. You’re going to need to figure out what evidence you have and what witnesses you have to bolster the claims that you’re making in this protective order. So let’s say you’re filing this petition on the grounds of domestic abuse. Let’s say your baby daddy or your baby mama is just absolutely physically, verbally, mentally, emotionally abusive, and you’re finally done, you’re out, you’ve had enough.
Well, first, you’re going to need to figure out what you can do to show the abuse. Have you had any friends who have seen you just getting completely yelled at and berated by your abusive partner? Have you had any friends who have seen you get slapped around, punched, hit, shoved, or tripped?
The Importance of Professional Legal Support
Do you have any injuries? Are there any police reports? Are there a bunch of hospital visits where you fell down the stairs or something? These are the things that you need to start thinking about in order to figure out, okay, we’ve made these allegations, we got this granted based on the allegations, but now we’ve got to prove them.
And this is where hiring an attorney comes in very handy. I always tell people it’s so much better to hire a lawyer than try to do it yourself. It’s the difference between having a trained surgeon perform surgery on you and performing surgery on yourself. You can probably do it on yourself and you might even survive, but it’s going to be a lot messier and a lot more painful than if you had a professional doing it for you.
Schedule Your Low-Cost Initial Strategy Session
So if you’ve gotten an EPO granted, come talk to me or go talk with another attorney. Let’s sit down. Let’s go over your evidence. Let’s figure out what witnesses we have that can strengthen your case and figure out how best we want to put these pieces together to show the full puzzle, which is that you’re entitled to an order of protection, and here’s why.
My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa criminal defense lawyer with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy. For a low-cost initial strategy session, call us at 918-879-1681 today.
