If you have made the hard private choice to end your marital relationship or domestic partnership in California and you and your spouse/partner remain in agreement on all issues in the divorce, an online divorce lawyer in California is certainly the best way to go in regards to convenience, low cost and efficiency.

Modern online divorce software crunches the big documentation load in a California divorce and reduces the expense of form preparation dramatically. And a secure online divorce interview empowers you in your own case. An online divorce interview can be completed 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 just paid the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your data input is a lot more likely to be thorough and accurate if it is entered leisurely through an online divorce interview.

Utilizing an online divorce lawyer in California definitely provides you the best of both worlds. All you require now is to locate an online divorce lawyer in California.

Here’s the issue. At this writing, there are very few real online divorce lawyers in California. The main reason there are very few online divorce lawyers is that when this Internet thing began to happen, somewhere around 1999-2000, attorneys and their bar associations had much the appearance of the proverbial deer in the headlights. They were clueless. And that wasn’t just with regard to divorce law practice, of course. It was with regard to ALL legal practice online. However, we are interested here just with the existing advancements in California divorce practice which will help you to get an intelligent and cost-effective online divorce in California.

So as a result of lawyers being unaware about the Web circa 1999-2000, there was a complete vacuum of attorneys providing legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were clearly going to be a very rewarding business sector. Naturally, low-quality online out-of-state con-men filled that vacuum. The result since about 2000 is that numerous California divorce buyers have been hurt financially and legally by the incompetence and fraud of about two dozen unlicensed, completely unregulated online divorce mills, situated mainly outside California, with at least 2 of them in India and a few in Ukraine.

Online divorce mills have actually controlled the extremely lucrative uncontested divorce sector for twenty years. Very many individuals have actually been harmed by their incompetence and scams. And lawyers have sat silently, without fighting back to offer an alternative online divorce offering – because they didn’t have the tools or the competitive spirit to do so – UNTIL NOW.

What Are Your Online Divorce Options in California Right Now?

1. Employ an unlicensed, uncontrolled online divorce mill from out of state or in India for somewhere in between $300 and $1000. They are significantly unskilled, make very many mistakes and do not know your state’s laws or your county’s Superior Court’s regional rules and policies. They will be the blind leading the blind. When they mess up your case, you will have no recourse against them. Your local District Attorney will have no interest in pursuing an out of state deception action against a divorce mill. Online divorce mills will not provide you with any type of legal rights analysis or case evaluation in your case. You will seldom have the ability to reach anybody by phone and if you complain to them, they will merely cut you loose and not respond by e-mail. You can compose all the online complaints you want. They don’t care. They are likewise substantially deceitful and will subject you to all kinds of price fraud, testimonial fraud and up-selling scams. They will also have actually offered your postal code to a local lawyer who will pay them for your case recommendation. That indicates they have a real interest in screwing up your case. If they mess up your case and refer you to their subscribed lawyer, they get paid twice!
2. Search for and hire a local California-licensed online divorce lawyer in California. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a real criticism procedure and severe ethical rules through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in California will care for your legal and financial rights in your case and be able to provide you with case review and legal suggestions as required. An online divorce lawyer in California will know the Superior Court Guidelines of Court and practices and policies (even of private judges) in your county. You wish to hire the online divorce lawyer in California on what is called an unbundled or limited scope representation basis. That indicates you will be doing all the footwork of submitting your case at Superior Court (it’s simple) and scheduling the service of forms on your spouse. You will be spending for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal know-how only where they are needed. This is the most financially efficient method to get an online divorce. It really is the very best of both worlds.

Online Divorce Fraud in California

What do I mean when I tell you that online divorce mills are deceptive? I should, and will, provide you with a couple of examples listed below, but the danger in offering examples is that you may think they represent the whole of the readily available online divorce scams. They do not. You must presume that the 2 examples I’ll offer below are not just very typical however also the tip of the iceberg.

There are so many examples of online divorce scams: misleading fee anchoring strategies; misrepresentation of fees; up-selling of services that were guaranteed or suggested at the “total” charge; sign-up underhandedness where they get your basic info and e-mail address right before you pay and bombard you with spam if you do not employ them; client testimonial scams where the divorce mill owns the testimonial business; online evaluation scams where the divorce mill owns the evaluation site; client testimonial scams where the divorce mill represents it has countless genuine testimonials however has forced clients to offer a “review” just minutes after they have actually paid and before any services are offered; claims that all “state forms” are furnished when the divorce mill understands that in almost every case there are local county papers also needed but not offered; claims that their price is “total” but then charges an “expedite” cost of $125 or you need to wait on 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce deception is relentless. There are new frauds 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 corporation, NetDivorce, is among those unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mills. Nevertheless, it has 40+ years (Internet and pre-Internet companies) in California divorce, is trustworthy, highly proficient (owned and run by a British lawyer), has announced a no-fraud pledge, publishes prolifically about online divorce fraud and is a founding member of the Online Divorce Association of America. NetDivorce’s flat $129 cost has actually been the lowest uncontested divorce fee online ever since 1999. It’s also a complete cost. You can not pay more.

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

So we were shocked when we saw recently that two of our most unskilled and deceptive competitors, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both situated in India, were offering the exact same $129 price as NetDivorce. We understood this could not be, especially as they invest heavily in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding process that significantly increases their costs of doing business and for that reason, their charges.

If you ever want to know what current scams are being used by getdivorcepapers.com, it’s easy. You just go read their 102 Better Business Bureau complaints. It’s all there. You won’t need to read beyond the most recent 5 grievances to discover that their $129 is NOT a complete cost. What a surprise! It’s a membership for the very first month only! After that first 30 days, they auto-hit your charge card for $40 monthly. It takes 6 months to finish a California divorce.

Just for entertainment, we called getdivorcepapers.com and spoke with a heavily Indian-accented fellow calling himself Shane. Shane didn’t wish to confess, but most likely knows about recording devices. So Shane ultimately confessed, after we hit him with the third degree 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is only for the first 30 days. We told Shane that we could not see that mentioned anywhere on his site, and then he hung up on us. Just imagine that.

Instantonlinedivorce.com is owned by the same Indian person who owns getdivorcepapers.com. He lives in Dubai. We would have liked to call instantonlinedivorce.com too, but they do not even provide a telephone number on their website.

Be extremely careful, folks. The online divorce industry is entirely uncontrolled. We’ve submitted 2 slam-dunk criminal complaints with the FBI online fraud department 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 employ any online divorce business unless you see the Online Divorce Association of America seal on its site.

Online Divorce Mill Fraud Example #2 – Testimonial Fraud

While the online divorce industry is subject normally to laws concerning false marketing and criminal scams, as a whole, it is mainly uncontrolled. There is no reliable licensing or bonding or administration. We turned in this deception to the FBI online scams department back on January 30 2015. It was assigned Complaint ID: I1501301241468482. We were never ever gotten in touch with after we filed. Absolutely nothing ever took place, and this deception still exists and is still defrauding divorce consumers 4 years later.

Mydivorcepapers.com is an active California-based online divorce supplier. Idivorceforms is a related firm. In July 2013, mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com began to show on the top page of their websites a certified client reviews service called certifiedcomments.com. This purports to be a service that contacts a subscribing company’s clients, confirms that they were in reality consumers of the organization in question and obtains from them comments, most likely mostly favorable, about the business’s performance. Such genuine firms offer a potentially valuable service in informing future potential customers what to expect and what others have actually experienced– providing of course that the reviews are genuine and not compensated, are from real clients and also the accreditation business is independent and transparent. There are a lot of such legitimate services around.

However public confidence must also be important to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com describes public reliance on its remarkably easy 3-page website (leading page, login page for “existing clients” and an email page to ask for an “invite” – all other pages on the site are detached). They state, “Demonstrate to your consumers that you are real and that each of your reviews has been validated by a third party as being 100% real.” and “We offer a 100% warranty that we have applied optimal practices to verify the reviews exhibited on your website.” And after that the most excellent, “We will not display our seal of approval on any review unless we are positive that it is real and passes our inspection. If we do not, we will pay you $250,000.”.

Certifiedcomments.com must have quite an extensive customers– given their commitment to sincerity and stability. Let’s have a look at how popular they are. They need to have lots of corporate customers. Go on and browse on “certifiedcomments.com.” In Google Search, I found this on the leading 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 site. I went 5 pages deep in the online search engine results and discovered not one other entry that referenced certifiedcomments.com and any other customer, aside from mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com. It appears that certifiedcomments.com has just those 2 subscribing consumers. It’s simply incredible that these two online divorce sites appear to be the only clients of certifiedcomments.com.

There’s no street or mailing address or telephone number or e-mail address exposed on certifiedcomments.com. How do their clients or potential clients call them? Oh yeah, through that webmail contact form on their site. So the next thing I did was to.
send out 3 demands across a 2 week duration. As anticipated, I heard nothing back from certifiedcomments.com.

I still was curious where certifiedcomments is located. So I pinged their domain server and lo and behold, it’s in Irvine, CA. It has a Cox Communications IP address. Next, I took a look at all other domains on the very same Cox Communications IP subnet as certifiedcomments.com. And here’s that list. What an incredible 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 initially composed online (back in 2015) about this fraud, the IP address of certifiedcomments.com was changed within a couple of 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 used by mydivorcepapers.com at the most current upgrade of this post in June 2021.

Fraud is the obtaining of some advantage or gain by intentionally representing that a substantive truth holds true when it is not and you know, or ought to understand, that it is not. If you obtain sales, i.e. gain, by the intentional representation that you have actually gained 3595 genuine client testimonials (since December 2018), as confirmed and certified by an independent accreditation company in the business of performing such functions, when you know that stated representation is false, or must have known it is false (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were oblivious when such ignorance would be reckless– you can not purposefully hold yourself in lack of knowledge of what appears on a site for which you are accountable), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.

Don’t be cheated by mydivorcepapers.com. They do NOT have actually 3595 independently authenticated client testimonials. You can draw your own conclusions as to where those 3595 “testimonials” likely originated from. Wherever they originated from, they are not confirmed.

For that reason, they are as useful as if getdivorcepapers.com’s staff and their moms wrote them.

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

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 California.  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 California?

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 California 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 California 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 California makes sense to you.

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