Online Divorce Lawyer is the Best of Both Worlds for Your California Uncontested Divorce

Online Divorce Mills

In your search, you will be exposed mostly to non-lawyer online divorce mills. These have been extremely successful since about 2000. Many California divorce consumers have been harmed by these unaccountable unlicensed companies. These are almost all out-of-state. The largest one, onlinedivorce.com, used to be in Ukraine. A few others are in India or Mexico. Yes, your personal data will be cut-and-pasted by someone’s granny in Mumbai or Tijuana.

This group pretends to be able to prepare divorce papers in every one of the 3000+ counties in the US. That is complete nonsense. Anyone in the localized divorce industry knows that local knowledge is super-important to the smooth processing of a case.

If you check the Trustpilot and Yelp pages of these outfits, you will see a high percentage of complaints about non-responsiveness, delay in the processing and delivery of prepared documents (because they only have the online interview to collect your data – they do not have the all-important and extremely complex software to handle the actual preparation of local state and county docs). Local knowledge again.

Complaints mention many court rejections for missing or improperly prepared docs.

Some complaints indicate that within a few minutes of signing up, consumers receive phone calls from sales people who have possession of their private data.

But here’s the main reason to avoid this group. Their fees of $199-$299 are implied to be complete fees, but they only cover the first 30 days. In a typical California uncontested divorce, you will need service for a minimum of about 4 months – if you move as quickly as possible.

We’ve been writing about this problem for at least 20 years, and with numerous lawsuits, DA fraud complaints and at least one state Attorney General lawsuit against onlinedivorce.com, these companies can no longer hide the fact that they will hit your credit card every month for an amount that is not disclosed. They can make the monthly whatever they want.

Go to the Terms of Use of onlinedivorce.com (this company is the worst of this group, but there are literally dozens of sites that use the “monthly” scam). They periodically move the specific term around to camouflage it. You may have to search the page for the words, “month,” “monthly” or “30 days.”

Here is the specific term in place on onlinedivorce.com at the time of this writing: “Your purchase provides access to the platform and support services for thirty days. After thirty days, access automatically renews monthly and your card will automatically be charged the current rate, as indicated at your time of purchase (rate subject to change).”

BOTTOM LINE: You do NOT want to hire an online divorce company that gets paid more if they do worse for you. Many complaints have indicated that the court held their paperwork for 2-3 months (Los Angeles County has a long standing 10-week delay on uncontested judgments; a few other counties are up around a 14-16-week delay) and then rejected the package because of one single missing doc. When that happens, onlinedivorce.com and the dozens of other outfits in this category get paid for an extra 4 months. STAY AWAY.