If you have made the difficult private decision to end your marriage or domestic partnership in Berkeley and you and your spouse/partner are in settlement on all matters in the divorce, an online divorce lawyer in Berkeley is certainly the best approach to go in regards to convenience, low cost and performance.

Modern online divorce software crunches the substantial forms load in a California divorce and reduces the expense of document preparation drastically. And a safe and secure online divorce interview empowers you in your own case. An online divorce interview can be finished in the comfort of your home or office and is a lot better than being in a lawyer’s waiting area and being handed a 30-page list of questions to finish, much of which does not apply to your case, right after you recently gave the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your data input is far more probable to be comprehensive and correct if it is typed in leisurely through an online divorce interview.

Utilizing an online divorce lawyer in Berkeley certainly provides you the very best of both worlds. All you need now is to discover an online divorce lawyer in Berkeley.

Here’s the difficulty. At this writing, there are very few real online divorce attorneys in Berkeley. The reason there are very few online divorce attorneys is that when this Internet thing began to take place, somewhere around 1999-2000, lawyers and their bar associations had much the look of the proverbial deer in the headlights. They were clueless. And that wasn’t only with regard to divorce law practice, of course. It was with regard to ALL legal practice online. However, we are concerned here just with the present advancements in California divorce practice which will help you to obtain an intelligent and economical online divorce in Berkeley.

So as a result of lawyers being unaware about the Internet circa 1999-2000, there was a total vacuum of lawyers providing legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were certainly going to be a very profitable business sector. Predictably, low-grade online out-of-state con-men filled that vacuum. The outcome since about 2000 is that many California divorce buyers have been damaged financially and legally by the incompetence and scams of about 2 dozen unlicensed, entirely unlicensed online divorce mills, located mostly outside California, with at least 2 of them in India and several in Ukraine.

Online divorce mills have actually dominated the really lucrative uncontested divorce business sector for twenty years. Very many individuals have actually been hurt by their incompetence and scams. And attorneys have sat quietly, without fighting back to deliver an alternative online divorce offering – since they didn’t have the tools or the competitive spirit to do so – UNTIL NOW.

What Are Your Online Divorce Options in Berkeley Right Now?

1. Employ an unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mill from out of state or in India for somewhere between $300 and $1000. They are significantly incompetent, make many mistakes and do not know your state’s laws or your county’s Superior Court’s local rules and policies. They will be the blind leading the blind. When they screw up your case, you will have no option against them. Your regional District Attorney will have no interest in pursuing an out of state scam action versus a divorce mill. Online divorce mills will not provide you with any sort of legal rights analysis or case review in your case. You will hardly ever have the ability to reach anyone by phone and if you complain to them, they will simply cut you loose and not respond by e-mail. You can write all the online grievances you want. They don’t care. They are likewise substantially fraudulent and will subject you to all type of fee scams, testimonial fraud and up-selling fraud. They will also have sold your postal code to a nearby lawyer who will pay them for your case referral. That indicates they have an actual interest in screwing up your case. If they ruin your case and refer you to their subscribed lawyer, they get paid two times!
2. Find and work with a local California-licensed online divorce lawyer in Berkeley. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a genuine dissatisfaction process and severe ethical guidelines through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in Berkeley will look after your legal and economic rights in your case and have the ability to offer you with case review and legal recommendations as needed. An online divorce lawyer in Berkeley will understand the Superior Court Guidelines of Court and practices and policies (even of private judges) in your county. You want to hire the online divorce lawyer in Berkeley on what is called an unbundled or limited scope representation basis. That suggests you will be doing all the footwork of filing your case at Superior Court (it’s simple) and arranging for the service of documents on your partner. You will be spending for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal know-how just where they are required. This is the most economically effective way to get an online divorce. It truly is the very best of both worlds.

Online Divorce Fraud in Berkeley

What do I denote when I advise you that online divorce mills are deceptive? I should, and will, present you with a couple of examples below, but the danger in providing examples is that you might think they represent the entirety of the available online divorce fraud. They do not. You should assume that the 2 examples I’ll offer below are not just very common however also the tip of the iceberg.

There are many examples of online divorce scams: deceptive fee anchoring methods; misrepresentation of costs; up-selling of services that were promised or indicated at the “complete” charge; sign-up underhandedness where they get your basic info and email address just before you pay and bombard you with spam if you don’t hire them; customer testimonial fraud where the divorce mill owns the testimonial company; online evaluation fraud where the divorce mill owns the evaluation site; client testimonial scams where the divorce mill represents it has thousands of genuine testimonials however has forced customers to supply a “testimonial” just minutes after they’ve paid and before any services are provided; claims that all “state forms” are furnished when the divorce mill knows that in nearly every case there are regional county kinds likewise needed however not supplied; claims that their cost is “total” however then charges an “expedite” fee of $125 or you need to wait for 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce deception is relentless. There are new scams all the time. Here are simply 2 examples. The very first one was brand new around September 2018.

Online Divorce Mill Fraud Example #1 – Price Fraud

Our sister company, NetDivorce, is among those unlicensed, uncontrolled online divorce mills. However, it has 40+ years (Internet and pre-Internet companies) in California divorce, is trustworthy, extremely proficient (owned and operated by a British lawyer), has actually published a no-fraud pledge, writes prolifically about online divorce scams and is a founding member of the Online Divorce Association of America. NetDivorce’s flat $129 cost has been the lowest uncontested divorce fee online since 1999. It’s likewise a complete fee. You can not pay more.

NetDivorce knows that none of its competitors can come close to matching its fee. They don’t have NetDivorce’s wicked-cool bulletproof proprietary software and other custom cloud systems established over the past 41+ years experience in handling ONLY California divorce.

So we were surprised when we saw just recently that 2 of our most inept and deceptive competitors, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both located in India, were offering the exact same $129 price as NetDivorce. We knew this couldn’t be, particularly as they invest heavily in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding procedure that greatly increases their costs of doing business and for that reason, their fees.

If you ever need to know what recent scams are being used by getdivorcepapers.com, it’s simple. You just go read their 102 Better Business Bureau complaints. It’s all there. You will not have to read beyond the most current 5 grievances to learn that their $129 is NOT a complete cost. What a surprise! It’s a subscription for the very first month only! After that first 1 month, they auto-hit your credit card for $40 each month. It takes 6 months to finish a California divorce.

Just for enjoyment, we called getdivorcepapers.com and spoke to a heavily Indian-accented fellow calling himself Shane. Shane didn’t want to confess, however most likely understands about taping mechanisms. So Shane ultimately admitted, after we hit him with the question 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is just for the first 30 days. We told Shane that we could not see that mentioned anywhere on his site, and after that he hung up on us. Just imagine that.

Instantonlinedivorce.com is owned by the exact same Indian man who owns getdivorcepapers.com. He resides in Dubai. We would have liked to call instantonlinedivorce.com too, but they do not even list a contact number on their site.

Be extremely cautious, folks. The online divorce market is totally uncontrolled. We’ve submitted 2 slam-dunk criminal problems with the FBI online scams division in the last 4 years and no action was taken on either. We’ll probably submit on this one too – and absolutely nothing will occur. Divorce customers are getting hurt and nobody cares.

Do not hire any online divorce company unless you see the Online Divorce Association of America seal on its website.

Online Divorce Mill Fraud Example #2 – Testimonial Fraud

While the online divorce business sector is subject typically to laws pertaining to inaccurate advertising and criminal scams, as a whole, it is mainly unregulated. There is no effective licensing or bonding or regulation. We turned in this fraud to the FBI online scams department back on January 30 2015. It was assigned Complaint ID: I1501301241468482. We were never contacted after we filed. Absolutely nothing ever occurred, and this scam still exists and is still defrauding divorce customers 4 years later on.

Mydivorcepapers.com is an active California-based online divorce service provider. Idivorceforms is a sister firm. In July 2013, mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com started to show on the leading page of their websites a professional client testimonials service called certifiedcomments.com. This claims to be a service that contacts a subscribing company’s customers, verifies that they were in reality clients of the service provider in question and obtains from them comments, most likely primarily positive, about the company’s performance. Such genuine companies supply a potentially important service in telling future possible clients what to expect and what others have actually experienced– providing naturally that the reviews are legitimate and unpaid, are from real clients and that the accreditation business is independent and transparent. There are a number of such legitimate services around.

However public peace of mind needs to likewise be essential to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com refers to public assurance on its incredibly easy 3-page website (top page, login page for “existing clients” and an e-mail page to ask for an “invitation” – all other pages on the site are detached). They say, “Show your customers that you are real and that each of your testimonials has actually been verified by a 3rd party as being 100% genuine.” and “We provide a 100% assurance that we have actually applied best practices to verify the reviews exhibited on your website.” And after that the most outstanding, “We will not display our seal of approval on any testimonial unless we are positive that it is real and passes our assessment. If we do not, we will pay you $250,000.”.

Certifiedcomments.com should have rather an extensive clientele– given their devotion to sincerity and stability. Let’s have a look at how popular they are. They should have numerous corporate clients. Go on and search on “certifiedcomments.com.” In Google Search, I found this on the top page of the search results page. Of the 9 top entries, 3 of them are the 3 public pages on the certifiedcomments website and 4 of them are the pages for mydivorceforms.com and idivorcepapers.com on the certifiedcomments website. I went 5 pages deep in the search engine results and discovered not one other entry that referenced certifiedcomments.com and any other customer, other than mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com. It appears that certifiedcomments.com has only those 2 subscribing clients. It’s just incredible that these 2 online divorce websites seem the only clients of certifiedcomments.com.

There’s no street or mailing address or contact number or email address exposed on certifiedcomments.com. How do their customers or prospective customers call them? Oh yeah, through that webmail contact form on their website. So the next thing I did was to.
send out 3 demands across a 2 week duration. As expected, I heard nothing back from certifiedcomments.com.

I still wondered where certifiedcomments is located. So I pinged their domain name server and lo and behold, it’s in Irvine, CA. It has a Cox Communications IP address. Next, I had a look at all other domains on the very same Cox Communications IP subnet as certifiedcomments.com. And here’s that list. What an unbelievable set of coincidences. The very same certifiedcomments.com service that mydivorcepapers.com uses as an independent certified testimonial service is hosted on the very same server as getdivorcepapers.com!

After I originally composed online (back in 2015) about this scam, the IP address of certifiedcomments.com was changed within a few days. That was why I took the screenshot of the list of domains on that IP address. However, this particular certifiedcomments.com testimonial scam is still being utilized by mydivorcepapers.com at the most current update of this post in June 2021.

Fraud is the obtaining of some benefit or gain by purposefully representing that a substantive truth is true when it is not and you understand, or ought to understand, that it is not. If you acquire sales, i.e. gain, by the deliberate representation that you have earned 3595 genuine client testimonials (as of December 2018), as verified and verified by an independent certification agency in the business of performing such functions, when you understand that stated representation is incorrect, or need to have known it is incorrect (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were oblivious when such ignorance would be careless– you can not actively hold yourself in lack of knowledge of what appears on a website for which you are responsible), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.

Don’t be deceived by mydivorcepapers.com. They do NOT have actually 3595 independently verified client testimonials. You can draw your own conclusions regarding where those 3595 “reviews” likely came from. Wherever they came from, they are not validated.

For that reason, they are as useful as if getdivorcepapers.com’s personnel and their mommies composed them.

How To Proceed in Light of Massive Online Divorce Fraud in Berkeley?

1. Don’t hire any online divorce provider who does not display on its website the membership seal of the Online Divorce Association of America. Membership in the ODAA requires adherence to the ODAA’s Code of Ethics.
2. Use the Online Divorce Lawyer web form below to find an online divorce lawyer in Berkeley.  We’re adding tech-savvy competitive online divorce lawyers to our directory all the time. Keep in mind that all online divorce lawyers in our directory are independently owned and operated law firms.

Why Use An Online Divorce Lawyer Berkeley?

1. No fraud – There are serious penalties imposed by the California Bar Association for ANY unethical behavior by lawyers. All fees must be clearly disclosed upfront.  There can be no price fraud or advertising fraud of any kind – pursuant to strict Bar Association ethics rules.
2. Online divorce lawyers in Berkeley are licensed by the state bar and well-educated in the law.
3. California lawyers are required to take continuing legal education courses.
4. Local lawyers in Berkeley know California law and local Superior Court Rules of Court as well as many policies of individual judges at your local Superior Court. They are also well known at your local Superior Court.
5. The younger generation of California lawyers tends to be more competitive than lawyers have been in the past.
6. California lawyers are now embracing and using more technology for the purposes of reducing costs and increasing efficiencies.
7. California lawyers are now embracing various Virtual Law Office practices that use technology to reduce costs even further than can be done by divorce software alone.
8. The California Bar Association has approved unbundled (also called Limited Scope representation) legal services in certain types of consumer law cases, such as uncontested divorce.  This means that many online divorce lawyers will offer such unbundled document-review services – many in the $300-500 range – very competitive when compared to the online divorce mills which provide a far riskier and less valuable service.
9. Online divorce lawyers provide a case evaluation to protect your economic and legal rights and will discuss case strategy with you before your case is filed.
10. Online divorce lawyers use wicked-cool divorce software and other cloud-based support systems that save you money.

Thanks for reading.  I hope this has helped. If an Online Divorce Lawyer in Berkeley makes sense to you.

If the best of both worlds makes sense to you, get started by either of the following options: