If you have made the tough personal choice to end your marriage or domestic partnership in Santa Cruz and you and your spouse/partner are in concurrence on all matters in the divorce, an online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz is absolutely the very best approach to go in terms of satisfaction, low cost and effectiveness.

Modern online divorce software crunches the big documentation load in a California divorce and lowers the charge of document preparation significantly. And a secure online divorce interview empowers you in your own case. An online divorce interview can be completed in the comfort of your office or home and is a lot more desirable than sitting 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 gave the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your information input is much more likely to be comprehensive and correct if it is typed in leisurely through an online divorce interview.

Utilizing an online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz certainly supplies you the best of both worlds. All you need now is to locate an online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz.

Here’s the problem. At this writing, there are extremely few authentic online divorce attorneys in Santa Cruz. The main reason there are very few online divorce attorneys is that when this World wide web thing started to take place, someplace around 1999-2000, attorneys and their bar associations had much the look of the proverbial deer in the headlights. They were unaware. 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 concerned here just with the current advancements in California divorce practice which will assist you to acquire an intelligent and cost-effective online divorce in Santa Cruz.

So as a result of lawyers being clueless about the Internet circa 1999-2000, there was a total vacuum of attorneys selling legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were undoubtedly going to be a very lucrative business sector. Predictably, low-grade online out-of-state con-men filled that vacuum. The result since about 2000 is that many California divorce buyers have actually been harmed financially and legally by the incompetence and fraud of about two 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 actually controlled the really lucrative uncontested divorce market for 20 years. Very many people have been hurt by their incompetence and scams. And attorneys have sat silently, without fighting back to furnish 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 Santa Cruz Right Now?

1. Work with an unlicensed, uncontrolled online divorce mill from out of state or in India for somewhere between $300 and $1000. They are substantially incompetent, make many errors and do not know your state’s laws or your county’s Superior Court’s local guidelines and policies. They will be the blind leading the blind. When they mess up your case, you will have no recourse against them. Your regional 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 review in your case. You will seldom be able to reach anyone by phone and if you make a complaint to them, they will just cut you loose and not respond by e-mail. You can compose all the online complaints you desire. They don’t care. They are likewise substantially fraudulent and will subject you to all sort of price fraud, testimonial fraud and up-selling scams. They will also have sold your zip code to a nearby lawyer who will pay them for your case recommendation. That means they have an actual interest in messing 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 neighborhood California-licensed online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a genuine criticism procedure and serious ethical rules through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz will care for your legal and economic rights in your case and be able to offer you with case evaluation and legal advice as needed. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz will understand the Superior Court Guidelines of Court and practices and policies (even of specific judges) in your county. You want to work with the online divorce lawyer in Santa Cruz 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 scheduling the service of papers on your partner. You will be spending for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal know-how only where they are required. This is the most financially efficient way to get an online divorce. It really is the very best of both worlds.

Online Divorce Fraud in Santa Cruz

What do I denote when I advise you that online divorce mills are fraudulent? I should, and will, present you with a couple of examples listed below, however the threat in providing examples is that you may believe they represent the whole of the available online divorce fraud. They do not. You ought to assume that the 2 examples I’ll provide listed below are not just very typical however also the tip of the iceberg.

There are numerous examples of online divorce scams: misleading cost anchoring strategies; misstatement of charges; up-selling of services that were promised or suggested at the “complete” cost; sign-up trickery where they get your basic information and e-mail address just before you pay and bombard you with spam if you don’t employ them; client testimonial fraud where the divorce mill owns the testimonial company; online evaluation scams where the divorce mill owns the evaluation site; client testimonial scams where the divorce mill represents it has thousands of real reviews but has forced customers to provide a “testimonial” simply minutes after they have actually paid and just before any services are offered; claims that all “state documents” are furnished when the divorce mill knows that in practically every case there are local county forms likewise required however not supplied; claims that their cost is “complete” however then charges an “fast track” fee of $125 or you need to wait for 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce fraud is never-ending. There are brand-new scams all the time. Here are simply 2 examples. The first one was brand new around September 2018.

Online Divorce Mill Fraud Example #1 – Price Fraud

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

NetDivorce knows that none of its competitors can come close to matching its charge. They do not have NetDivorce’s wicked-cool bulletproof proprietary software application and other custom 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 incompetent and fraudulent competitors, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both situated in India, were offering the same $129 fee as NetDivorce. We knew this could not be, particularly as they invest heavily in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding procedure that greatly increases their expenses of staying in business and therefore, their charges.

If you ever would like to know what current frauds are being utilized by getdivorcepapers.com, it’s easy. You simply go read their 102 Better Business Bureau complaints. It’s all there. You will not have to check out beyond the most recent 5 grievances to discover that their $129 is NOT a total charge. What a surprise! It’s a membership for the first month only! After that very first 1 month, they auto-hit your credit card for $40 per month. It takes 6 months to complete a California divorce.

Just for fun, we called getdivorcepapers.com and talked to a heavily Indian-accented fellow calling himself Shane. Shane didn’t wish to admit it, however probably understands about tape-recording mechanisms. So Shane ultimately admitted, after we struck him with the third degree 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is just for the first 30 days. We told Shane that we couldn’t see that discussed anywhere on his site, and after that he hung up on us. Just imagine that.

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

Be really careful, folks. The online divorce industry is completely uncontrolled. We have actually filed 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 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 website.

Online Divorce Mill Fraud Example #2 – Testimonial Fraud

While the online divorce industry is subject normally to laws involving misleading marketing and criminal scams, as a whole, it is mostly uncontrolled. There is no efficient 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 contacted after we filed. Absolutely nothing ever occurred, and this scam still exists and is still defrauding divorce consumers 4 years later on.

Mydivorcepapers.com is an active California-based online divorce provider. Idivorceforms is a sister business. In July 2013, mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com began to show on the top page of their websites a certified customer testimonials service called certifiedcomments.com. This claims to be a service that contacts a subscribing company’s customers, validates that they were in truth customers of the service provider in question and obtains from them comments, most likely mostly positive, about the company’s efficiency. Such legitimate firms provide a potentially important service in informing future potential customers what to expect and what others have experienced– providing of course that the reviews are genuine and unpaid, are from real customers and that the accreditation agency is independent and transparent. There are a lot of such genuine services around.

But public reliance must likewise be very important to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com refers to public peace of mind on its incredibly basic 3-page site (leading page, login page for “existing customers” and an e-mail page to ask for an “invite” – all other pages on the website are disconnected). They state, “Show your consumers that you are genuine and that each of your testimonials has been verified by a third party as being 100% real.” and “We offer a 100% guarantee that we have exercised best practices to confirm the reviews exhibited on your site.” And then 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 should have quite a comprehensive clientele– given their dedication to sincerity and integrity. Let’s take a look at how popular they are. They need to have many business clients. Proceed and browse on “certifiedcomments.com.” In Google Search, I discovered 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 website. I went 5 pages deep in the search engine results and found not one other entry that referenced certifiedcomments.com and any other client, other than mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com. It appears that certifiedcomments.com has only those 2 subscribing clients. It’s just fantastic that these 2 online divorce websites seem the only customers of certifiedcomments.com.

There’s no street or mailing address or phone number or e-mail address exposed on certifiedcomments.com. How do their customers or potential customers call them? Oh yeah, through that webmail contact form on their website. So the next thing I did was to.
send 3 demands throughout 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 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 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 wrote online (back in 2015) about this deception, the IP address of certifiedcomments.com was altered within a couple of days. That was why I took the screenshot of the list of domains on that IP address. However, this specific 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 receiving of some benefit or gain by intentionally representing that a substantive fact holds true when it is not and you understand, or need to know, that it is not. If you acquire sales, i.e. gain, by the intentional representation that you have gained 3595 legitimate client reviews (as of December 2018), as confirmed and accredited by an independent accreditation company in the business of performing such functions, when you know that said representation is false, or need to have known it is false (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were ignorant when such lack of knowledge would be negligent– you can not actively hold yourself in ignorance of what appears on a site for which you are responsible), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.

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

Therefore, they are as valuable as if getdivorcepapers.com’s personnel and their mothers composed them.

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

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 Cruz.  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 Cruz?

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 Cruz 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 Cruz 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 Cruz makes sense to you.

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