Amorous asset protection attorney Stephen Sears is advertising on the Press-Telegram website

Some people you never expect to see again—especially before coffee. But much to my surprise, I saw a very familiar face staring back at me from Wednesday morning’s Press-Telegram website: the mustachioed, non-smiling visage of successful Irvine asset protection attorney Stephen A. Sears.

I know Sears—or at least I got to know him a little bit two-and-a-half years ago, through court records, and conversations with one of his former girlfriends, other attorneys and a friendly private detective.

Sears, as I wrote in the Feb. 22, 2007 OC Weekly, was a man whom court and birth records showed had fathered eight children with four different girlfriends—none of whom he’d married, and all of whom lived in Irvine, within four miles of each other.

When I wrote that story, Sears was embroiled in three civil lawsuits, including two brought by a former girlfriend.

Sound unusual? Well, that was two years ago—but it did at the time. I chalked it up, in part, to Irvine, which seemed uniquely suited to his, er, task.

From my story:

“Apparently it wasn’t all that difficult for Sears … to juggle four girlfriends and families in a highly structured city where most walking, biking, shopping and sleeping is done within its designated subdivisions, many of them gated and guarded to discourage spur-of-the-moment visitors,”

Local attorneys scratched their heads when I asked their opinions.

“Mr. Sears appears to be a very well-educated person. He appears to be very well-experienced,” Tustin attorney Phillip A. Putman told me in 2007.

Putman was representing Charles Nguyen Allen, who’d paid Sears $5,000 to do some work for him—which Sears allegedly hadn’t done.

“If the guy would just use his brains in an honest way, he could do very well,” Putman lamented.

At the time, Sears seemed like he might be having a bad year: a jury trial loomed in August 2007, and when I tracked him to an Orange County Superior Court date that February, I watched him get cornered by a process server.

Then, of course, I left OC Weekly to join The District Weekly and kind of lost track of him.

And now here he is in Long Beach, advertising on the Press-Telegram’s website. Awww!

(You may have to wait for it a minute to see the ad; it’s part of a rotating ad crawl that includes a Jeep ad, a loose dentures spot, and something about advertising in the P-T.)

His picture appears to be an old one he once used to advertise his services in the Los Angeles Times, but his skills are the same: “Tax & Estate Planning, Family LPs, Corporations, Pre-Marital, Pre-Divorce Planning.”

Sears should have considerable expertise in all those areas by now.

Tags: asset protection, California, irvine, Long Beach, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Superior Court, Phillip A. Putman, press telegram, Southern California, Stephen A. Sears, Stephen Sears, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Tustin