I get why he would try to be her lawyer in court, but i can't fathom why he would miss a fuckign court date. Nick is stupid, and irresponsible as all hell, but is he this stupid? I can't think of any good reason for a lawyer to miss a court date, can you?
Well, in Nick's case, I could see him being committed or in rehab. But seriously, no reason. Apparently he just ignored his email until his inbox filled up and the notice was "returned as undeliverable." So he may have somehow signed on to take a parking ticket as his only case in years and managed to fuck even that single case up.
I never understood what he was going to do if he did appear. The judge isn't going to give her a more special deal because Nick is there. There are zero grounds to fight a ticket like this.
There are lawyers who actually specialize in minor stuff like this, and a lot of them do pretty good business by sake of sheer volume. And yes, they can often get a better deal, especially on things like points that raise your insurance rates. Sometimes this means pleading to something with an actually higher fine but without points.
Also, the officer quite often simply doesn't show up. Gambling on that is often worth a shot because it's not like they're going to give continuance after continuance to some petty shit like that. Between parking tickets and moving violations, I've probably gone to court seven times just on my own, and three times it was just thrown out.
Twice I got a better deal that saved me on insurance (and remained at 0 points) and twice it was obviously not going to go well so I just pled to it and paid it. So five times out of seven I got a better result than just paying it and not showing up. Come to think of it, just that by itself would mean I have a more winning record than Cuckieta.
Anyway, the people who do this for an actual living, or as a loss leader for a small flat fee just to advertise to potential clients (like the free will thing a lot of small town lawyers do) generally just mass mail everyone on the traffic docket. If you've lived in a city and got a traffic ticket there, you may have received one of these solicitation mails.
Since these hearing days are cattle calls, a lot of these lawyers will show up representing half the people on the docket. Since if you are challenging a ticket, you are moved to the end of the line (people who are just pleading get handled all in a bunch), the lawyer generally has to spend the whole session there, so to turn a profit on a whole day, the more people they're representing, the better.
They knock off a bunch of the procedural defaults involving cops just not showing up (the fact of the ticket is not itself proof of anything because it is hearsay). Then, generally at the very end, they'd argue any cases where there was some actual valid legal argument or evidentiary issue where they could prove the ticket was bull, like with a dashcam.
I've known people who did this and made pretty good money, not just on the goofy petty ticket things (although even that is not shabby if you do it a lot), but because these kind of people often end up needing them for their more bread and butter stuff like DUIs or even vehicular homicides.