If you have reached the challenging private decision to end your marital relationship or domestic partnership in Santa Barbara and you and your spouse/partner remain in understanding on all concerns in the divorce, an online divorce lawyer in Santa Barbara is definitely the best approach to go in regards to satisfaction, low cost and effectiveness.

Modern online divorce computer software crunches the huge forms load in a California divorce and reduces the expense of document preparation dramatically. And a 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 sitting in a lawyer’s waiting room and being handed a 30-page questionnaire to finish, much of which doesn’t apply to your case, right after you just now paid the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your information input is a lot more likely to be comprehensive and accurate if it is entered leisurely through an online divorce interview.

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

Here’s the trouble. At this writing, there are extremely few genuine online divorce lawyers in Santa Barbara. The reason there are very few online divorce lawyers is that when this Internet thing started to happen, someplace around 1999-2000, lawyers and their bar associations had much the appearance of the proverbial deer in the headlights. They were unaware. And that wasn’t just with regard to divorce law practice, obviously. It was with regard to ALL legal practice online. However, we are interested here just with the existing developments in California divorce practice which will help you to get a smart and affordable online divorce in Santa Barbara.

So as a result of lawyers being clueless about the Internet circa 1999-2000, there was a total vacuum of lawyers providing legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were obviously going to be a very lucrative business sector. Predictably, low-quality online out-of-state con-men filled that vacuum. The result since about 2000 is that numerous California divorce consumers have been hurt economically and legally by the incompetence and fraud of about two dozen unlicensed, completely unlicensed online divorce mills, located primarily outside California, with a minimum of 2 of them in India and a few in Ukraine.

Online divorce mills have dominated the very rewarding uncontested divorce industry for twenty years. Many people have actually been hurt by their incompetence and scams. And lawyers have sat quietly, without fighting back to offer 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 Santa Barbara Right Now?

1. Work with an unlicensed, uncontrolled online divorce mill from out of state or in India for somewhere in between $300 and $1000. They are considerably inexperienced, make very 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 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 kind of legal rights checkup or case review in your case. You will rarely be able 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 desire. They don’t care. They are likewise substantially deceptive and will subject you to all sort of price fraud, testimonial fraud and up-selling fraud. They will also have actually sold your zip code to a nearby lawyer who will pay them for your case referral. That means they have an actual interest in messing up your case. If they ruin your case and refer you to their subscribed lawyer, they get paid twice!
2. Find and work with a neighborhood California-licensed online divorce lawyer in Santa Barbara. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a genuine criticism process and serious ethical rules through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Barbara will care for your legal and financial rights in your case and have the ability to offer you with case review and legal advice as required. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Barbara will understand the Superior Court Guidelines of Court and practices and policies (even of individual judges) in your county. You want to hire the online divorce lawyer in Santa Barbara on what is called an unbundled or limited scope representation basis. That means 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 partner. You will be paying for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal expertise only where they are needed. This is the most financially effective method to get an online divorce. It really is the very best of both worlds.

Online Divorce Fraud in Santa Barbara

What do I mean when I inform you that online divorce mills are fraudulent? I should, and will, present you with a couple of examples listed below, however the threat in supplying examples is that you may think they represent the totality of the readily available online divorce fraud. They do not. You need to presume that the 2 examples I’ll offer below are not only extremely typical however also the tip of the iceberg.

There are a lot of examples of online divorce scams: deceptive fee anchoring methods; misstatement of charges; up-selling of services that were assured or implied at the “complete” cost; sign-up trickery where they get your basic details and e-mail address just before you pay and bombard you with spam if you do not hire them; client testimonial scams where the divorce mill owns the testimonial company; online evaluation scams where the divorce mill owns the review website; client testimonial fraud where the divorce mill represents it has thousands of real reviews but has forced clients to offer a “testimonial” just minutes after they’ve paid and just before any services are supplied; claims that all “state documents” are supplied when the divorce mill understands that in almost every case there are regional county types likewise required but not offered; claims that their price is “total” but then charges an “fast track” charge of $125 or you need to wait for 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce deception is nonstop. There are new scams all the time. Here are just 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 honest, highly skilled (owned and operated by a British barrister), has announced a no-fraud promise, writes prolifically about online divorce scams and is a founding member of the Online Divorce Association of America. NetDivorce’s flat $129 cost has actually been the lowest uncontested divorce cost online ever since 1999. It’s also a total charge. You can not pay more.

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

So we were shocked when we saw recently that 2 of our most incompetent and deceitful competitors, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both situated in India, were quoting the same $129 fee as NetDivorce. We understood this couldn’t be, especially as they invest greatly in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding procedure that considerably increases their expenses of staying in business and therefore, their fees.

If you ever need 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 need to check out beyond the most current 5 accusations to discover that their $129 is NOT a complete cost. What a surprise! It’s a membership for the first month only! After that very first one month, they auto-hit your charge card for $40 per month. 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 want to confess, but most likely understands about recording devices. So Shane ultimately admitted, after we hit him with the third degree 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is just for the very first one month. We told Shane that we couldn’t see that discussed anywhere on his website, and then he hung up on us. Picture that.

Instantonlinedivorce.com is owned by the exact same Indian guy who owns getdivorcepapers.com. He resides in Dubai. We would have liked to call instantonlinedivorce.com too, but they don’t even list a phone number on their website.

Be extremely careful, folks. The online divorce market is entirely unregulated. 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 most likely submit on this one too – and absolutely nothing will happen. Divorce consumers are getting hurt and no one cares.

Do not hire any online divorce business 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 industry is subject normally to laws pertaining to untrue advertising and criminal scams, as a whole, it is mainly unregulated. There is no effective licensing or bonding or control. 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 ever called after we filed. Absolutely nothing ever happened, and this deception still exists and is still defrauding divorce customers 4 years later on.

Mydivorcepapers.com is an active California-based online divorce provider. Idivorceforms is a sister service provider. In July 2013, mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com started to show on the leading page of their sites a recognised customer testimonials service called certifiedcomments.com. This claims to be a service that contacts a subscribing company’s clients, verifies that they were in truth consumers of the organization in question and obtains from them comments, presumably mostly favorable, about the business’s performance. Such genuine agencies provide a possibly important service in informing future possible consumers what to expect and what others have actually experienced– providing obviously that the testimonials are genuine and unpaid, are from real customers and also the accreditation agency is independent and transparent. There are a number of such legitimate services around.

However public assurance should also be very important to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com refers to public trust on its remarkably easy 3-page site (top page, login page for “existing clients” and an email page to request an “invite” – all other pages on the website are detached). They state, “Show your customers that you are real and that each of your testimonials has been validated by a third party as being 100% genuine.” and “We offer a 100% guarantee that we have practiced best practices to certify the testimonials exhibited on your website.” And after that the most impressive, “We will not show our seal of approval on any review unless we are confident that it is real and passes our assessment. If we do not, we will pay you $250,000.”.

Certifiedcomments.com should have rather a comprehensive customers– offered their commitment to honesty and integrity. Let’s have a look at how popular they are. They must have many 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 site. I went 5 pages deep in the online search engine results and found 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 just amazing that these 2 online divorce websites seem 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 customers 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 three demands across a 2 week duration. As expected, I heard absolutely nothing back from certifiedcomments.com.

I still was curious 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 took a look at all other domains on the exact same Cox Communications IP subnet as certifiedcomments.com. And here’s that list. What an amazing set of coincidences. The very same certifiedcomments.com service that mydivorcepapers.com utilizes as an independent certified testimonial service is hosted on the very same server as getdivorcepapers.com!

After I initially wrote online (back in 2015) about this scam, 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. Nevertheless, this particular certifiedcomments.com testimonial scam is still being utilized by mydivorcepapers.com at the most recent upgrade of this post in June 2021.

Fraud is the securing of some benefit or gain by deliberately representing that a substantive reality is true when it is not and you understand, or should understand, that it is not. If you acquire commerce, i.e. gain, by the intentional representation that you have earned 3595 genuine customer reviews (as of December 2018), as verified and accredited by an independent accreditation agency in the business of performing such functions, when you know that said representation is false, or should have understood it is false (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were oblivious when such lack of knowledge 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.

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

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

How To Proceed in Light of Massive Online Divorce Fraud in Santa Barbara?

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 Santa Barbara.  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 Santa Barbara?

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 Santa Barbara 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 Santa Barbara 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 Santa Barbara makes sense to you.

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