Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Alameda | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Alameda?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Alameda. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. However, wise consumers usually do not get any of those jobs done other than by a regional market expert. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL monitor agency. To put it simply, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a legitimate issue. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments since they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to provide extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand industry developments that considerably minimize your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Alameda. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Alameda
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Alameda is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you also don’t want to give a small amount of money to someone who will screw up your divorce.
If you pay $300 or $400 to an unlicensed, unlicensed online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you end up taking care of their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best job done at the most reasonable fee. That affordable expense is probably not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Alameda.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Alameda
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional Alameda divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has already contracted a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Alameda?
- Do It Yourself
- Unlicensed Unregulated Online Divorce Mill Out of State or in India/Ukraine/Mexico
- Local Online Divorce Lawyer
- Local Lawyer on Traditional Full Representation
Let’s summarize your 4 uncontested divorce options in Alameda:
| Do-It-Yourself | $0 in money; but what are the costs to you of hours spent standing in line at self-help or trying to figure it out online, which is practically impossible in 2024? | Low Quality; No Professional Guidance; No Complete Instructions Available; Time Consuming; Many Rejections of Your Documents by the Court; Frustrating; Very Difficult to Accomplish in 2024 and Beyond; If You Fail (you probably will), You’ll Have To Hire Someone Below and They Will Know That You Have Some Problem in Your Case and Will Charge You Much More Than Their Regular Fee; California DIY Divorce is FALSE ECONOMY |
| Cheap Online Divorce Mills – Incompetent, Fraudulent and Mostly Out-of-State | $139-$1100 – but you’ll NEVER get through at $139 – that just gets you in the door so that the up-selling can begin. Also hidden monthly fees – they hit your credit card every month. So they make sure your case is delayed as long as possible. | Unlicensed; Unregulated; Low Quality Work; No Legal Advice Provided; No Accountability; Most Located Out-of-State or in India; Lots of Fraud, Trickery and Up-Selling; Lots of Mistakes That Affect Your Legal and Economic Rights for Many Years; No Local Knowledge; They Get Paid Monthly – So They Purposefully Slow Down Your Case So That They Get Paid More |
| Expensive Online Divorce Mills – Mostly in California; Fronted by Lawyers, but NOT Law Firms | $1400-$4500; “Teaser” get-em-in-the-door fees as low as $275-$400, but those packages are incomplete and will NOT get you divorced. Those packages just start the up-selling. | Not Lawyers; No Legal Advice; High Quality and Good Local Knowledge; Everything Aggressively Upsold – Including the Traditional Lawyers Who Own the Place. Examples: Hello Divorce, divorce.com and AIdivorce.legal |
| Local Online Divorce Lawyer | $700-$2000; new option; has attracted more competitive, creative, problem-solving divorce lawyers | High Quality; No Fraud; Full Accountability; Licensed Professional; Local Knowledge; Cost Effective: Uses Lawyer Only Where Needed; Scale-able As Needed; Deals With Problems That MIGHT Arise but Does NOT Require You To Pay High Fees Automatically In Case Something MIGHT Happen; If Your Case Remains Uncontested, You Know Your Cost Up Front |
| Local Divorce Lawyer -Traditional Full Representation | $3500-$7500++ PLUS $300-$400 per hour after they burn off the retainer | High Quality; No Fraud; Full Accountability; Licensed Professional; Local Knowledge; Convenient; At Least 4X Overpriced |
Now let’s analyze your 4 uncontested divorce options in Alameda:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Even if you can download them does not mean you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has actually
developed one of the most complex divorce processeses in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published instructions that covered all cases, they would be hundreds of pages long. If there was a YouTube video that revealed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be numerous hours long.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix than it would have cost for you to employ {a city} online divorce lawyer in the first place (see below). Going it alone in California divorce nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve written substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular scams we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews when they do not.
Also, look at the Better Business Bureau pages for 3 of the 4 most popular online divorce mills in the California market:
| Number of BBB Complaints | BBB Rating | Link to BBB Page for This Website | |
|---|---|---|---|
| getdivorcepapers.com | 105 | F | BBB page |
| onlinedivorce.com | 37 | F | BBB page |
| mydivorcepapers.com | 78 | F | BBB page |
Keep in mind that the number of complaints and BBB ratings listed in the table above are dynamic. These were accurate at the time of publication. They rarely get better.
Finally, check this video that covers just one of the many widespread pricing frauds currently being used by the 4 most popular online divorce mills.
Online divorce mills are among the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add brand-new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Alameda have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard you. Stay away from unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mills. They are bad news.
Local Online Divorce Lawyer
Here are 10 reasons why this is the strongly recommended “best of both worlds” option to get an uncontested divorce in Alameda:
- 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.
- Online divorce lawyers in Alameda are licensed by the state bar and well-educated in the law.
- California lawyers are required to take continuing legal education courses.
- Local lawyers in Alameda 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.
- The younger generation of California lawyers tends to be more competitive than lawyers have been in the past.
- California lawyers are now embracing and using more technology for the purposes of reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. Example: see a highly innovative online divorce mediation service offered by our Online Divorce Lawyer in Carlsbad.
- 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.
- 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 $700-1500 range – very competitive when compared to the online divorce mills which provide a far riskier and less valuable service.
- Online divorce lawyers provide a case strategy session to protect your economic and legal rights and will discuss case strategy with you before your case is filed.
- Online divorce lawyers now use wicked-cool divorce software and other cloud-based support systems that save you money.
Local Lawyer on Traditional Full Representation
I have indeed previously covered this alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Alameda
Better still, forget about calling lawyers who are not competitive and have not begun to utilize the two dominant uncontested divorce industry trends: unbundled services and online divorce. Tell them to enjoy the 1980’s.
If the best of both worlds makes sense to you, get started by either of the following options:
The problem with the providers in this group is that they are all aggressive up-sellers. Their only goal is to get you signed up to a cheaper package and then up-sell you to a $1500-$4500 package.