Divorce And Mediation Blog

Our office has a new mascot, Emma. She is a 12 week old Wheaten Terrier puppy. She is cute as the dickens. She arrived Saturday, and came to the office the last two days to keep us company and work on her house breaking. What fun. New clients get a free hand licking. We are so proud of her that we had to post a picture.

Naturally, this is on her day off.

I get about 300 pieces of e-mail a day, the vast majority of it junk. A high percentage of the junk is a scam of some sort [usually phishing, which is trying to get you to give up private codes], and ads for Viagra. I have spam filters, but the evil doers get better each day at making the spam look like it comes from someone with whom I regularly do business, or by coding the messages to make the computer think they come from me or my office.

I regularly do business with Amazon.com. I order books related to divorce, custody, relationships, computers, and other areas that relate to my law practice. So, I'm often on the lookout for e-mail from Amazon to notify me of a shipment, or notify me of or resolve a problem.

The latest scam I've noticed is and "Amazon Thanks for your order" message addressed to me. They look just like a regular notice from Amazon that it has acknowledged an order, and it gives me an opportunity to "view and edit your orders online." Of course they want me to click on one of the links, go to a page that looks like Amazon, and find out what the heck I've ordered that I wasn't expecting. Each of these is different in it's content, so I must read them carefully to see if they are legitimate. They want me to try to log onto my account, enter my user name, e-mail, and password so that they can later do this themselves.

When I read the mail carefully, I start to see obvious errors. One of several that I received this morning says that the Order Grand Total is $63.99. Below that is a summary that says that the subtotal of all items is $96.99, then the total before tax is $43.99, sales tax is zero, and "Total for this Order" is $10.99. It then gives me the option to click and see the items, Price: $71.99. Must be Nigerians filling out a form letter. Usually, phishing scams aren't this obvious.

I'm glad my parents don't use the computer I gave them for e-mail. I'm sure that they would just assume it is an honest mistake and give away their life savings.

Upon returning to Manhattan in his youth from a stay in an art colony, Andrei Codrescu wrote:

"That was me then: a young poet. I needed people more than I needed trees. I'm older now. I need trees more than I need people. But it's nice to have both - only the ratios change. When I was young, I needed 10 people to one tree. Now it's 100 trees per person."

I live near a big city [4 miles from Nordstrom], but in a rural area next to a natural open space park. I travel to Manhattan on business about once a year, and love it there [at least for brief periods]. But, the best part of my trips [aside from the food] is walking through Central Park.

The older I get, the more space and wilderness I need. When I came across this quote, I realized I am not alone. I cannot imagine life in an apartment full time.

This was taken by me in May, 2010. [Double click on the image for a full view] What a lovely spot, although just beyond the tree line are huge numbers of people living and working - Central Park helps ease the pain by adding some nature to the mix].

Well here's another complaint about non-lawyers handling your divorce, from our local newspaper, the North County Times

Allegedly the drunk entrepreneur operating a "divorce assistance office" [or as I call them "practicing law without a license"] was drunk and pointed a .357 at two customers.

Maybe this is the way to keep the costs and heartache down: "Settle now, or else"; or how about "Focus on me and your own problems won't seem so great." Well, they do have a website and claim to have thousands of satisfied customer for divorce or bankruptcy, although they don't claim to have any license or training. The "founder," one Dennis Jester, puts an "MA" after his name. That implies he has a Master of Arts degree: Maybe in Art History, or Hotel Management - doesn't say!

I hope he qualifies for a court appointed lawyer and doesn't try to represent himself. :)

Last Friday, a not too well liked or respected lawyer who practices family law was arrested. The allegation was that he had found a new way of alternate dispute resolution [ADR] to solve his divorce problems: According to the San Diego Police Department, the lawyer had repeatedly solicited others to murder his estranged wife, who had a restraining order against him. Early this week, he was released when the DA announced they were still investigating the case because they didn't have enough information to ensure a conviction.

Now, it could be a husband sarcastically saying "I'd like to find a hit man to get rid of her," or some similar comment without real intent, or....

Among lawyers the arrest fell into the "I hope he did it and gets convicted" category. Much like the obnoxious, lying pig of a lawyer a few years ago who died [originally of unknown causes] in his mid-50's - everyone was hoping he's been murdered - vicariously imagining someone taking the life of a miserable human being [although I'm sure he was nice to his wife and children, most of the family law bar despised him].

Phones were ringing off the hook as lawyers called to alert their friends, and confirm their alibis, and joking that the list of suspects was the San Diego phone book. Many were depressed when it was disclosed he died of a heart attack - certainly not the joy of thinking of someone literally ripping his heart out.

Nearly 30 years ago, an attorney named Richard Crake was murdered at his front door in a gated community - same jokes, but the most likely theory was that it was a former client, former opposing party, some member of the bar association, or someone else who learned to hate him - turned out to be employee of a man who claimed Crake owed him $100,000, who hit him in the head in an attempt to intimidate him into paying.

It's not that we really want these people convicted or dead, it's just our way of hoping there is justice, even though not direct - like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion.

As I've written here before, I have several word searches enabled through Google to keep me up to date on legal issues, primarily divorce, family law, and the geographical areas where I practice. Generally, I want any information relating to my area of practice and the two towns where I have offices: Rancho Santa Fe and Escondido.

When I don't recognize some alert Google sends me, I click on the link and go to the web page to which it refers. Some of these alerts merely send me to someone else's blog, which I read to see if it contains anything related to my practice. Sometimes, the blog is virtually unintelligible, for no particular reason. Today, I found the following "post":

"This is an warning of a WordPress page, you could modify this to place aggregation
most yourself or your place so readers undergo where you are reaching from. You
crapper create as some pages same this digit or sub-pages as you same and control
every of your noesis exclusive of WordPress."

WordPress is a site which will host your blog for you. Now I get a lot of these - they sound as though maybe the original was written in English, translated by a computer to Swahili, then converted to Japanese, then a computer translated the result back to English.

If this is "The Information Age," why do I have trouble finding the information part of it, hidden among the crap. Sometimes it's like looking for the needle in the haystack, not knowing for sure that there is a needle in there.

Citrix, owners of GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting, had an interesting e-mail today.  It has some interesting stories to brighten your day.

BMW, which is famous for its AFDay print ads, reportedly announced in ads in Britain a new technology and Microsoft announced it is releasing "Alpine Legend" a new game to bring yodeling to the masses, as reported by CNN, in an article discussing the history of the day, and some examples.

Enjoy the Day.