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

Modern online divorce computer software crunches the big documentation load in a California divorce and lowers the charge of form preparation dramatically. And a safe and 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 recently paid the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your information input is a lot more likely to be thorough and accurate if it is typed in leisurely through an online divorce interview.

Utilizing an online divorce lawyer in Oakland definitely delivers you the best of both worlds. All you need now is to locate an online divorce lawyer in Oakland.

Here’s the problem. At this writing, there are very few real online divorce attorneys in Oakland. The main reason there are really few online divorce lawyers is that when this World wide web thing started to occur, somewhere around 1999-2000, attorneys and their bar associations had much the appearance of the proverbial deer in the headlights. They were unaware. 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 interested here only with the existing advancements in California divorce practice which will help you to obtain a smart and affordable online divorce in Oakland.

So as a result of lawyers being clueless about the Internet circa 1999-2000, there was a total vacuum of attorneys supplying legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were undoubtedly going to be an extremely profitable industry. 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, totally unregulated online divorce mills, located mostly outside California, with at least 2 of them in India and several in Ukraine.

Online divorce mills have dominated the extremely rewarding uncontested divorce market for 20 years. Many people have actually been hurt by their incompetence and fraud. And lawyers have sat silently, without fighting back to furnish an alternative online divorce offering – due to the fact that they didn’t have the tools or the competitive spirit to do so – UNTIL NOW.

What Are Your Online Divorce Options in Oakland 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 inexperienced, make very many mistakes and do not know your state’s laws or your county’s Superior Court’s regional guidelines and policies. They will be the blind leading the blind. When they screw up your case, you will have no option against them. Your local District Attorney will have no interest in pursuing an out of state scam action against a divorce mill. Online divorce mills will not supply you with any kind of legal rights checkup or case evaluation 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 complaints you want. They don’t care. They are likewise significantly deceptive and will subject you to all kinds of price scams, testimonial fraud and up-selling fraud. They will also have offered your zip code to a nearby lawyer who will pay them for your case referral. 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 work with a local California-licensed online divorce lawyer in Oakland. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a real dissatisfaction process and major ethical rules through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in Oakland will take care of your legal and economic rights in your case and be able to provide you with case strategy and legal guidance as needed. An online divorce lawyer in Oakland will understand 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 Oakland 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 easy) and arranging for the service of documents on your partner. You will be paying for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal knowledge only where they are required. This is the most financially efficient way to get an online divorce. It genuinely is the best of both worlds.

Online Divorce Fraud in Oakland

What do I denote when I inform you that online divorce mills are deceptive? I should, and will, present you with a couple of examples below, however the threat in supplying examples is that you might believe they represent the totality of the available online divorce fraud. They do not. You must assume that the 2 examples I’ll offer listed below are not only very common however also the tip of the iceberg.

There are numerous examples of online divorce scams: deceptive price anchoring methods; misstatement of fees; up-selling of services that were guaranteed or suggested at the “total” charge; sign-up trickery where they get your basic details and e-mail address right before you pay and bombard you with spam if you don’t employ them; customer testimonial fraud where the divorce mill owns the testimonial company; online review fraud where the divorce mill owns the review site; client testimonial fraud where the divorce mill represents it has thousands of real reviews but has forced customers to provide a “testimonial” simply minutes after they’ve paid and well before any services are offered; claims that all “state documents” are supplied when the divorce mill knows that in almost every case there are local county forms likewise required but not supplied; claims that their fee is “complete” but then charges an “fast track” cost of $125 or you have to await 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce deception is never-ending. There are brand-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 one of those unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mills. However, it has 40+ years (Internet and pre-Internet companies) in California divorce, is trustworthy, highly skilled (owned and operated by a British lawyer), has actually announced 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 price has actually been the most affordable uncontested divorce fee online since 1999. It’s likewise a complete price. You can not pay more.

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

So we were surprised when we saw recently that two of our most inept and deceptive competitors, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both located in India, were offering the same $129 charge as NetDivorce. We knew this couldn’t be, particularly as they invest greatly in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding process that considerably increases their expenses of doing business and therefore, their costs.

If you ever would like to know what recent frauds are being utilized by getdivorcepapers.com, it’s simple. You just go read their 102 Better Business Bureau grievances. It’s all there. You won’t have to check out beyond the most current 5 complaints to find out that their $129 is NOT a total charge. What a surprise! It’s a subscription for the first month only! After that first 30 days, they auto-hit your credit card for $40 each month. It takes 6 months to complete a California divorce.

Just for fun, we called getdivorcepapers.com and spoke to a heavily Indian-accented fellow calling himself Shane. Shane didn’t wish to admit it, but most likely knows about tape-recording mechanisms. So Shane ultimately admitted, after we struck him with the question 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is just for the first thirty 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 person who owns getdivorcepapers.com. He resides in Dubai. We would have liked to call instantonlinedivorce.com too, but they do not even provide a telephone number on their website.

Be very mindful, folks. The online divorce industry is entirely unregulated. We’ve submitted 2 slam-dunk criminal complaints 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 nothing will happen. Divorce customers are getting hurt and nobody cares.

Don’t work with any online divorce company 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 usually to laws concerning inaccurate marketing and criminal scams, as a whole, it is mostly uncontrolled. There is no reliable licensing or bonding or regulation. We turned in this deception to the FBI online fraud division back on January 30 2015. It was designated Complaint ID: I1501301241468482. We were never ever called 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 company. Idivorceforms is a sister service provider. In July 2013, mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com started to display on the top page of their sites a recognised customer reviews service called certifiedcomments.com. This purports to be a service that contacts a subscribing business’s clients, validates that they were in fact consumers of the company in question and obtains from them comments, most likely mostly favorable, about the company’s performance. Such legitimate agencies supply a potentially valuable service in telling future potential clients what to anticipate and what others have actually experienced– providing obviously that the testimonials are genuine and unpaid, are from genuine consumers and also the certification company is independent and transparent. There are a lot of such legitimate services around.

But public confidence needs to likewise be necessary to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com describes public trust on its extremely easy 3-page site (top page, login page for “existing customers” and an e-mail page to request an “invitation” – all other pages on the site are disconnected). They say, “Demonstrate to your clients that you are genuine and that each of your reviews has been confirmed by a 3rd party as being 100% real.” and “We offer a 100% warranty that we have actually exercised optimal practices to verify the reviews displayed on your website.” And then the most outstanding, “We will not display our seal of approval on any testimonial unless we are confident that it is real and passes our assessment. If we do not, we will pay you $250,000.”.

Certifiedcomments.com must have quite an extensive clients– offered their commitment to sincerity and stability. Let’s take a look at how popular they are. They must have many corporate clients. Proceed and browse on “certifiedcomments.com.” In Google Search, I found this on the top page of the search results. Of the 9 top entries, 3 of them are the 3 public pages on the certifiedcomments site 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 client, besides mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com. It appears that certifiedcomments.com has just those 2 subscribing consumers. It’s simply remarkable 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 email address exposed on certifiedcomments.com. How do their clients or possible customers call them? Oh yeah, through that webmail contact form on their website. So the next thing I did was to.
send out three demands across a 2 week period. As anticipated, I heard absolutely nothing back from certifiedcomments.com.

I still questioned 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 exact same Cox Communications IP subnet as certifiedcomments.com. And here’s that list. What an extraordinary 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 wrote online (back in 2015) about this scam, the IP address of certifiedcomments.com was altered within a few days. That was why I took the screenshot of the list of domains on that IP address. However, this specific certifiedcomments.com testimonial fraud is still being used by mydivorcepapers.com at the most current update 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 need to understand, that it is not. If you acquire commerce, i.e. gain, by the deliberate representation that you have earned 3595 genuine client testimonials (as of December 2018), as confirmed and certified by an independent certification company in the business of carrying out such functions, when you know that stated representation is false, or should have known it is false (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were oblivious when such ignorance would be careless– you can not purposefully hold yourself in ignorance of what appears on a website for which you are accountable), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.

Do not be fooled by mydivorcepapers.com. They do NOT have 3595 independently validated client reviews. You can draw your own conclusions regarding where those 3595 “reviews” likely originated from. Wherever they originated from, they are not verified.

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

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

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 Oakland.  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 Oakland?

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 Oakland 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 Oakland 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 Oakland makes sense to you.

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