Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Antioch | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Antioch?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Antioch. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty parlor. You can have your car fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, wise consumers normally don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local industry specialist. That expert will be skilled, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog agency. To put it simply, that professional is liable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t desire you to conserve money. They desire you to offer additional money to them! That’s not on the level when they are aware of industry trends that significantly lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Antioch. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Antioch
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Antioch is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, but you likewise do not want to pay a small amount of money to someone who will screw 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 financing their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Many divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable expense. That sensible expense is most likely not the smallest price, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Antioch.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Antioch
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a local Antioch divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has already hired a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 Antioch?
- 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 Antioch:
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 Antioch:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has indeed developed one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up free of charge forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were written 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 many 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 contract {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 published widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my various articles on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to collect fake client testimonials as though they were real reviews from real customers. It showed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are 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 grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Antioch have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure you. Stay away from unlicensed, uncontrolled 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 Antioch:
- 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 Antioch 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 Antioch 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’ve already covered this option above. This is the traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed reasons to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Antioch
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:
Or
powered by Advanced iFrame