Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Bakersfield | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Bakersfield?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Bakersfield. However 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 qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. However, clever customers typically don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry specialist. That professional will be competent, experienced and certified and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. To put it simply, that professional is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local attorneys.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to save money. They want you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not reputable when they are aware of industry trends that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Bakersfield. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Bakersfield
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Bakersfield is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you likewise do not 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 financing their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best task done at the most reasonable price. That affordable price is most likely not the lowest price, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. In other words, 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 apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Bakersfield.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Bakersfield
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Bakersfield divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged 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 partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Bakersfield?
- 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 Bakersfield:
| 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 Bakersfield:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Just because you can download them does not mean you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce process in the whole nation. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up cost-free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is different. If there were written directions 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.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 have indeed written widely in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my many posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of specific frauds we have actually identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony customer reviews as though they were real reviews from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was also 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 exact same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer reviews when they do not.
Likewise, 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 amongst the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Bakersfield 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 Bakersfield:
- 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 Bakersfield 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 Bakersfield 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 option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge 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 option. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Bakersfield
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.