Help centre

We are a California law firm that does one thing: clearing California criminal records. You take a free eligibility check, and if it looks like we can help, you create an account, answer the intake questions, sign a fee agreement and pay a flat fee. An attorney then pulls your records, confirms what is possible, prepares the petition, files it, serves the district attorney and appears at the hearing if one is set.

What we do not do is clear records from other states, federal convictions, or convictions from other countries. California courts have no power over those, and we will tell you so rather than take the work.

Yes. No account, no card, and no email address required to see your result. The result appears on screen in full.

It will also tell you when the answer is that you do not need us — specifically, when it looks like California may already have cleared your record automatically and for nothing. That is not a loss leader; it is the point.

About two minutes. It is nine to eighteen questions depending on your answers, one per screen, all multiple choice. There is no box asking you to type out what happened, deliberately.

Not to take the check. You only need one if you decide to go ahead, because that is what lets you save your answers, come back later and follow the case.

Since October 2024 the California Department of Justice reviews records every month and grants relief automatically under Penal Code section 1203.425, with no petition and at no cost. Between July 2022 and December 2023 it did this for 6,861,324 people — and it notifies none of them.

To find out, request your own California Department of Justice record. You are fingerprinted at a Live Scan location and pay a $25 fee to the Department of Justice. When the record arrives, look for a note reading 'relief granted' next to the conviction, or 'arrest relief granted' next to an arrest.

Fewer than half the people who received automatic relief had every entry on their record cleared, so plenty of people still need a petition. But you should find out which group you are in before you pay anyone.

It does not erase the record. California does not destroy criminal records, and a dismissal under Penal Code 1203.4 is exactly that — a dismissal.

It does not restore firearm rights. The statute says so directly.

It does not excuse you from disclosing the conviction when you apply for public office, for a state or local licence, or to contract with the California State Lottery.

It does not stop the conviction being used against you in a later criminal case.

It does not help with immigration. A 1203.4 dismissal is generally not effective to eliminate a conviction for federal immigration purposes.

If the case was a DUI, it does not touch your DMV record, and the conviction still counts as a prior for ten years.

Yes. A judge can end probation early under Penal Code 1203.3, and the dismissal can be filed immediately afterwards. It works best when you have completed everything the court ordered and have a concrete reason the relief matters now — a job offer, a licence application, military enlistment.

You cannot petition for a dismissal while probation is running. That part is a hard statutory bar, not a matter of persuasion.

No, and this is the single most common piece of misinformation in this area. California law says expressly that a petition shall not be denied because an order of restitution or a restitution fine is unpaid, and that unpaid restitution is not grounds for finding you failed probation.

Separately, most court-imposed fees were made unenforceable and uncollectible as of 1 January 2022, and judgments imposing them were required to be vacated. The balance you have been avoiding may no longer exist.

Victim restitution itself still has to be paid. It just does not block the petition.

Each case needs its own petition. Additional cases are $199 each on top of the main service.

If you have four or more, or cases in more than one county, the eligibility check will send you to an attorney rather than quoting a price. That is not a sales tactic — the order these are cleared in genuinely matters, and a questionnaire cannot work it out.

We cannot help, and neither can any California court. You have to apply in the state where you were convicted, and the rules there will be different.

Federal convictions are harder still: there is no general federal expungement statute. The narrow exception is a first-offender simple-possession set-aside for someone who was under 21 at the time. Otherwise the route is a presidential pardon.

Records review takes two to three weeks, because it depends how quickly the court and the Department of Justice respond to us.

Preparing and filing takes about a week after that.

The court then takes two to four months, depending on the county and how busy its criminal division is. Some counties are considerably slower than others, and we will tell you what we are actually seeing in yours rather than quoting a brochure number.

Usually not. Many of these petitions are decided on the papers with nobody appearing at all. Where a court does set a hearing, the firm appears for you.

You do not need to live in California, and plenty of our clients do not.

Nothing is required. We can obtain your records ourselves, and that is included in the fee.

If you already have your California Department of Justice record, upload it — it is the one document that shows whether the State already cleared this for free, and it can save weeks.

Court paperwork from the original case helps too, particularly the minute order or the abstract of judgment, because they settle which statute applies.

You get an email at each stage. Those emails deliberately contain no case details — just your reference and a link back to your account. Criminal history does not belong in an inbox that might be read by someone else.

Your case page shows the full timeline at any time.

It is not always the end. Where relief is discretionary — a violated probation, a DUI — petitions are sometimes denied because the showing was thin rather than because the case was hopeless, and they can often be brought again later with better support.

We will tell you what would need to change, and there is no charge for that conversation. A denial for a statutory reason, such as the offence being excluded by the statute, is different and we will say so plainly.

Yes. Our prices are all-in. Many California counties charge nothing to file a record-clearing petition in the first place; where a county does charge, we pay it.

There is no processing fee, no administration fee, and no surcharge if you had a probation violation. Every competitor we checked adds $250 to $300 for a violation.

Yes — three equal monthly payments, same total, with no interest and no fee added. Work starts when the first payment clears.

If money is genuinely the obstacle, tell us. We would rather work something out than have you give up on this.

If we review your records and find we cannot get you the relief you paid for, the engagement ends there and you are refunded in full, including the records-review stage.

If you change your mind, you are refunded any part of the fee that has not yet been earned, calculated using the stages set out in your fee agreement.

We do not advertise a money-back guarantee on a court outcome. Several firms in this market do, and their published terms carry enough exclusions that the guarantee does not apply to a large share of real cases. We would rather tell you honestly up front that a judge decides this.

'LEGAL SERVICES'. It deliberately does not name expungement or this firm.

That is a privacy decision, not an accident: a bank statement gets seen by spouses, parents and employers, and what you are dealing with is nobody else's business.

Use the 'I forgot my password' link on the sign-in page. We email a link that works for one hour and can be used once.

Changing your password signs you out on every other device, which is what you want if you think someone else had access.

The firm, and nobody else. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. This site loads no third-party scripts, no advertising trackers and no external fonts, so nothing you type here is visible to any other company.

Once you are a client, everything you tell us is also protected by the attorney-client privilege. Even before that, what you enter in the eligibility check is treated as confidential under California Rule of Professional Conduct 1.18.

Documents are stored encrypted and separately from the database, and are never sent by email.

Yes. Email us and we will deal with it. Uploaded documents are deleted on request once a case closes, and an account with no case can be deleted at any time.

The one limit is that information held as part of a legal matter often has to be retained for a period under professional obligations. We will tell you exactly what we are keeping and why.

We do not cold-call anyone and we do not buy leads. If someone phones you claiming to be from California Expungement Law, it is not us.

We will only contact you about your own case, and we ask for a phone number only so there is a way to reach you if something genuinely needs a conversation.