If you have reached the challenging personal decision to end your marital relationship or domestic partnership in Santa Monica and you and your spouse/partner are in agreement on all issues in the divorce, an online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica is certainly the very best way to go in regards to satisfaction, low cost and effectiveness.

Modern online divorce software crunches the huge paperwork load in a California divorce and reduces the cost 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 office or home and is a lot more desirable than being in a lawyer’s waiting room and being handed a 30-page list of questions to complete, much of which does not apply to your case, right after you just now gave the lawyer $5000-$7500. Your data input is far more likely to be comprehensive and correct if it is entered leisurely through an online divorce interview.

Using an online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica definitely gives you the very best of both worlds. All you need now is to discover an online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica.

Here’s the concern. At this writing, there are incredibly few authentic online divorce lawyers in Santa Monica. The reason there are extremely few online divorce attorneys is that when this Internet thing started to occur, somewhere around 1999-2000, attorneys 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, naturally. It was with regard to ALL legal practice online. Nevertheless, we are interested here only with the current advancements in California divorce practice which will help you to acquire an intelligent and cost-efficient online divorce in Santa Monica.

So as a result of lawyers being clueless about the Web circa 1999-2000, there was a total vacuum of lawyers selling legal services online. Yet online consumer legal services were undoubtedly going to be an extremely lucrative business sector. Naturally, low-quality online out-of-state con-men filled that vacuum. The outcome since about 2000 is that many California divorce consumers have been damaged economically and legally by the incompetence and fraud of about 2 dozen unlicensed, entirely unregulated online divorce mills, situated primarily outside California, with a minimum of 2 of them in India and several in Ukraine.

Online divorce mills have dominated the very lucrative uncontested divorce business sector for twenty years. Many individuals have actually been harmed by their incompetence and scams. And attorneys 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 Santa Monica 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 substantially incompetent, make 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 regional District Attorney will have no interest in pursuing an out of state rip-off action versus a divorce mill. Online divorce mills will not provide you with any type of legal rights checkup or case review in your case. You will hardly ever have the ability to reach anyone by phone and if you make a complaint to them, they will merely cut you loose and not reply by email. You can compose all the online complaints you desire. They don’t care. They are also considerably fraudulent and will subject you to all type of price scams, testimonial scams and up-selling fraud. They will also have actually sold your postal code to a nearby lawyer who will pay them for your case recommendation. That suggests they have a real interest in messing up your case. If they screw up your case and refer you to their subscribed lawyer, they get paid twice!
2. Locate and hire a local California-licensed online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica. That online divorce lawyer will be subject to a real criticism procedure and serious ethical guidelines through California’s Bar Association. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica will look after your legal and economic rights in your case and be able to offer you with case review and legal guidance as needed. An online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica will know the Superior Court Guidelines of Court and practices and policies (even of private judges) in your county. You want to work with the online divorce lawyer in Santa Monica 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 documents on your partner. You will be spending for the online divorce lawyer’s services and legal competence just where they are required. 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 Santa Monica

What do I indicate when I tell you that online divorce mills are deceitful? I should, and will, present you with a couple of examples listed below, but the danger in offering examples is that you might believe they represent the entirety of the available online divorce scams. They do not. You ought to presume that the 2 examples I’ll supply below are not only really typical but also the tip of the iceberg.

There are numerous examples of online divorce scams: deceptive price anchoring methods; misrepresentation of costs; up-selling of services that were promised or suggested at the “complete” cost; sign-up underhandedness where they get your basic information and email address just before you pay and bombard you with spam if you do not hire them; client testimonial fraud where the divorce mill owns the testimonial business; online evaluation fraud where the divorce mill owns the review website; customer testimonial fraud where the divorce mill represents it has countless genuine reviews but has forced customers to provide a “review” just minutes after they’ve paid and well before any services are provided; claims that all “state documents” are supplied when the divorce mill knows that in almost every case there are local county documents also needed but not supplied; claims that their fee is “total” however then charges an “fast track” charge of $125 or you have to wait on 10-12 days to get your docs.

Online divorce fraud is perpetual. 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 related corporation, NetDivorce, is one of those unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mills. However, it has 40+ years (Internet and pre-Internet companies) in California divorce, is honest, extremely qualified (owned and operated by a British barrister), has actually published 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 charge has been the lowest uncontested divorce price online since 1999. It’s also a complete cost. You can not pay more.

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

So we were amazed when we saw recently that two of our most unskilled and deceptive rivals, getdivorcepapers.com and instantonlinedivorce.com, both located in India, were quoting the very same $129 charge as NetDivorce. We knew this could not be, particularly as they invest greatly in Google AdWords Pay Per Click – the competitive bidding process that greatly increases their costs of doing business and for that reason, their costs.

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

Just for enjoyment, we called getdivorcepapers.com and spoke with a heavily Indian-accented fellow calling himself Shane. Shane didn’t want to confess, however probably understands about taping devices. So Shane ultimately admitted, after we hit him with the third degree 3 or 4 times, that their $129 is only for the very first 30 days. We told Shane that we could not see that discussed anywhere on his website, and then he hung up on us. Picture that.

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

Be extremely cautious, folks. The online divorce market is entirely unregulated. We have actually submitted 2 slam-dunk criminal problems with the FBI online scams department in the last 4 years and no action was taken on either. We’ll most likely file on this one too – and absolutely nothing will occur. Divorce customers are getting hurt and nobody cares.

Don’t employ 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 generally to laws regarding false advertising and criminal fraud, as a whole, it is mostly uncontrolled. There is no effective licensing or bonding or administration. We turned in this rip-off to the FBI online scams department back on January 30 2015. It was assigned Complaint ID: I1501301241468482. We were never contacted after we filed. Nothing ever took place, and this scam still exists and is still defrauding divorce consumers 4 years later.

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 consumer reviews service called certifiedcomments.com. This professes to be a service that contacts a subscribing business’s customers, confirms that they were in reality clients of the service company in question and obtains from them remarks, probably mainly favorable, about the business’s performance. Such genuine firms supply a potentially valuable service in telling future possible clients what to expect and what others have experienced– providing obviously that the reviews are legitimate and not compensated, are from real consumers and also the certification business is independent and transparent. There are a lot of such legitimate services around.

However public reliance needs to also be necessary to a service like certifiedcomments.com. In fact, certifiedcomments.com describes public assurance on its remarkably basic 3-page website (leading page, login page for “existing clients” and an e-mail page to ask for an “invite” – all other pages on the site are disconnected). They state, “Show your clients that you are real and that each of your reviews has been validated by a 3rd party as being 100% real.” and “We offer a 100% assurance that we have actually practiced optimal practices to confirm the reviews showcased on your site.” And then the most impressive, “We will not show our seal of approval on any review 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 quite a comprehensive clients– offered their dedication to honesty and integrity. Let’s take a look at how popular they are. They need to have many corporate customers. Proceed and search on “certifiedcomments.com.” In Google Search, I found this on the leading 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 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 just those 2 subscribing clients. It’s just remarkable that these two 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 clients or potential clients call them? Oh yeah, through that webmail contact form on their website. So the next thing I did was to.
send out 3 requests across a 2 week duration. As anticipated, I heard 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 took a look at all other domains on the 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 utilizes 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 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. Nevertheless, this particular certifiedcomments.com testimonial deception is still being used by mydivorcepapers.com at the most recent update of this post in June 2021.

Fraud is the obtaining of some advantage or gain by purposefully representing that a substantive truth is true when it is not and you understand, or must understand, that it is not. If you get sales, i.e. gain, by the intentional representation that you have actually gained 3595 legitimate client testimonials (as of December 2018), as confirmed and verified by an independent accreditation agency in the business of carrying out such functions, when you know that stated representation is false, or ought to have known it is incorrect (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were ignorant when such ignorance would be careless– you can not purposefully hold yourself in ignorance of what appears on a site for which you are responsible), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.

Do not be tricked by mydivorcepapers.com. They do NOT have 3595 independently confirmed customer reviews. You can draw your own conclusions as to where those 3595 “reviews” likely originated from. Wherever they came from, they are not validated.

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

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

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 Monica.  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 Monica?

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 Monica 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 Monica 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 Monica makes sense to you.

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