Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Atascadero | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Atascadero?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Atascadero. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever customers normally don’t get any of those tasks done except by a regional industry expert. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate issue. No one wishes to spend too much 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 trends are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, regional lawyers.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they don’t want you to save money. They want you to offer extra money to them! That’s not on the level when they know industry developments that significantly decrease your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Atascadero. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Atascadero
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Atascadero is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, but you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will mess 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 paying for their mistakes for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Many consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole removed, you want to get the best job done at the most sensible price. That reasonable cost is most likely not the lowest fee, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key 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 Atascadero.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Atascadero
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Atascadero divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate problems, your marital estate is not substantial, 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 Atascadero?
- 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 Atascadero:
| 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 Atascadero:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce process in the whole nation. Just Vermont is harder.
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 pick up free of charge forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The directions 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 different. 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 many hours long.
Do not fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to repair 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve written extensively before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular scams we have actually pinpointed 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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial fraud over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in new scams and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Atascadero have been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. No one 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 Atascadero:
- 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 Atascadero 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 Atascadero 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 alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted factors to use this option, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Atascadero
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.