In January of this year, we decided to begin the process of filing for getting primary custody of my daughter. We don't have a whole lot of money so we investigated other options outside of lawyers (who are not cheap). I found "About the Children" on the internet. I man I spoke to gave a very heartfelt description of their "mission" to protect fathers' rights in regards to custody of their children. He even told me of his own personal experience with it. He went into great detail about how they weren't just out to get peoples' money but to "provide a service" to the community and protect unwitting consumers from falling prey to money-hungry, cutthroat lawyers for thousands of dollars. He told me that for a meager $100 fee to join and a $25 a month fee, I would be able to have access to everything that I needed to bring my case to a successful conclusion. He told me all about how family law is a scam and very expensive but completely unnnecessary. All you need is the correct documentation. He stated that for a reasonable fee of around $800, they could prepare these documents and that would be all I needed. What a crock, this all turned out to be!
For starters, the staff was very difficult to reach consistently, they rarely answered or returned phone calls, they took long periods of time to answer emails if at all, and when you did get them on the phone, they did not give very many straight answers. The main concensus of what I was told was assurance that all I needed was the right documents prepared the correct way and all would be well. This turned out to be entirely untrue. The documents, it turned out were filed to the wrong court to begin with so we wasted the day that we took off of work only to find out that we had to chase About the Children down to fix their mistake and also take another additional day off of work to file again.
Later we found out from the opposing attorney's letter to us and the court that the documents had been filled out incompletely and insufficiently, making us appear as fools to the court. Again, I tried to get About the Children to fix the problem. They had assigned some fast-talking lawyer-type guy who actually came across as more of a used-car salesman who constantly kept trying to assuage my dissatisfaction with their level of service by reminding me how much money I was saving by going through them rather than an attorney. The punch line to all of this is the fact that they were never able to get the paperwork right and I wound up having to hire an attorney anyway. This put us down lawyer fees PLUS their $1000. Close to 4 grand all told.
Since then I have researched them more closely (something I should have done earlier) and found that they have quite an impressive number of complaints filed with the better business bureau. Just goes to show you, when it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Use at your own risk. Buyer beware!!!
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