Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Altadena | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Altadena?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Altadena. But do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle 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 removed by somebody who is not a physician. However, clever consumers generally do not get any of those tasks done except by a regional industry specialist. That expert will be proficient, experienced and certified and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that expert is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate issue. No one wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, regional attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments because they do not desire you to save cash. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they understand industry trends that considerably minimize your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to keep away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Altadena. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Altadena
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Altadena is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to someone who will mess up your divorce.
If you pay $300 or $400 to an unlicensed, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you wind up paying for their mistakes for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable expense. That affordable fee is most likely not the smallest cost, but it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Altadena.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Altadena
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still select a regional Altadena divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Altadena?
- 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 Altadena:
| 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 Altadena:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most challenging divorce treatment in the whole country. Just Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were published guidelines that covered all cases, they would be hundreds of pages long. If there was a YouTube video that showed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to repair 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 scams in California. That is just among my various blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve identified in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up phony customer testimonials as though they were real testimonials from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews when they do not.
Also, check out 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few 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 will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new scams and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Altadena have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will secure 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 Altadena:
- 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 Altadena 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 Altadena 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 already covered this option above. This is the traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better websites and are far more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Altadena
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.