Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Apple Valley | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Apple Valley?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Apple Valley. However do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, smart consumers generally do not get any of those jobs done other than by a local market expert. That professional will be proficient, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to give extra money to them! That’s not on the level when they know industry trends that dramatically lower your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Apple Valley. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Apple Valley
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Apple Valley is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you also don’t want to pay a small amount of money to somebody 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 screw up your case and you end up paying for their mistakes for several 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.
A lot of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, car repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable expense. That reasonable fee is most likely not the smallest fee, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest expense. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Apple Valley.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Apple Valley
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a local Apple Valley divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently chosen a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Apple Valley?
- 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 Apple Valley:
| 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 Apple Valley:
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 needs to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Even if you can download them doesn’t indicate you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce procedure 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 might pick up cost-free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small 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 maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The directions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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 many hours long.
Do not 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 select {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 have indeed written substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my various articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve detected in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up phony customer reviews as though they were genuine reviews from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was also 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 same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, check 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 amongst the most swindling online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Apple Valley have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one will protect you. Keep 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 Apple Valley:
- 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 Apple Valley 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 Apple Valley 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 alternative above. This is the traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a big amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Apple Valley
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.