San Antonio CDL Ticket Lawyer

No deferred disposition. No defensive driving. Texas excludes commercial license holders from both, and the exclusion follows the driver rather than the truck — it applies to a ticket written in a personal car on a day off.

Thirty days to tell your employer. Federal law requires a driver to notify the motor carrier in writing within thirty days of a conviction, which is often how a safety director learns of a ticket the driver hoped to quietly pay.

Sadovsky & Ellis defends commercial drivers and the carriers that employ them in the municipal courts and justice courts of Bexar County and the surrounding South Texas counties.

Why paying the ticket is the one thing not to do

Paying a citation is a plea of no contest. For an ordinary motorist that is often the cheapest way out, because a first offense can be swept up in deferred disposition or a driving safety course and never reach the record at all. A commercial driver has neither option.

What the driver is really buying with that payment is a conviction on a record that the carrier, the insurer, and every future employer will read. The fine is almost never the expensive part.

It compounds quickly. Two serious violations inside three years is a sixty-day disqualification. A third is a hundred and twenty days. A driver who pays two tickets to avoid missing work can lose four months of work on the third.

What Texas law actually says

The deferred disposition provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure do not apply to a violation of a law relating to motor vehicle control, other than parking, committed by a person who holds a commercial driver’s license or held one when the offense was committed. That is article 45A.301.

The driving safety course subchapter carries the identical exclusion at article 45A.351(c). Both took effect on January 1, 2025, when House Bill 4504 recodified the old Chapter 45 into Chapter 45A. A great many pages still cite the repealed article 45.051, which is a useful signal about how closely a firm is reading the statute.

Federal law reinforces it. Under 49 C.F.R. § 384.226 a state may not mask, defer imposition of judgment on, or divert a commercial license holder’s conviction so that it stays off the driving record. There is no version of this where the conviction quietly disappears.

That leaves two outcomes worth pursuing: dismissal, or a resolution that is not a moving violation conviction. Which of those is realistic depends on the charge, the court, the officer, and the driver’s record, and it is what the first conversation is for.

The federal consequences a conviction triggers

Disqualification is federal and automatic. It is set out in 49 C.F.R. § 383.51, and the state issues it whether or not anyone told the driver it was coming.

• Major offenses — driving a commercial vehicle at or above 0.04 blood alcohol, refusing a test, leaving the scene, using a vehicle in a felony, or driving while disqualified. One year, or three if hazardous materials were being transported. A second major offense is a lifetime disqualification.
• Serious traffic violations — fifteen or more over the limit, reckless driving, improper lane change, following too closely, texting or holding a phone while driving a commercial vehicle, driving one without a valid CDL, or a traffic control violation tied to a fatal crash. A second within three years is sixty days; a third is a hundred and twenty.
• Railroad grade crossing violations — sixty days for a first, a hundred and twenty for a second within three years, a full year for a third.
• Out-of-service order violations — the harshest tier. One hundred eighty days to a year for a first, two to five years for a second within ten, three to five for a third.
• Employer notification — a written report to the carrier within thirty days of conviction under 49 C.F.R. § 383.31, and immediate notice of a suspension or disqualification under § 383.33.
• The carrier’s record too — roadside violations follow the motor carrier’s DOT number into its safety measurement profile, which is why a safety director cares about a driver’s ticket as much as the driver does.

The violations that come through this office

Speed is the common one, and the fifteen-over line in the federal table is why a difference of two miles an hour on the citation can matter more than the fine attached to it. Following too closely and improper lane change are the two that surprise drivers most, because neither feels serious at the roadside and both are named in the federal table.

Then the ones written at a scale or a roadside inspection: logbook and hours-of-service entries, an equipment or defect violation, an overweight or permit citation, an out-of-service order placed on the driver or the vehicle. Those run on different rules and are addressed on their own pages.

And the ones that reach beyond the license: a DWI charge where the commercial threshold is half the ordinary one, or a charge that carries a disqualification on top of whatever the criminal court does.

Where we appear

Bexar County municipal court and its justice courts, and the county and justice courts of Comal, Guadalupe, Wilson, Atascosa, Medina, Kendall, Karnes, Frio, La Salle, Dimmit, McMullen, Live Oak and Gonzales counties.

That range is not incidental. The tickets that reach commercial drivers in this part of Texas are written on the I-35 and I-10 corridors and on the ranch roads feeding the Eagle Ford field, which means the court on the citation is frequently sixty or ninety miles from where the driver lives. A firm that appears in those courts anyway saves the driver the day of work that going in person would cost.

How a CDL citation is handled here

Frequently Asked Questions