Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Bell Gardens | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Bell Gardens?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Bell Gardens. But do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, wise customers usually do not get any of those tasks done except by a local market expert. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. 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 profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local attorneys.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they do not want you to save cash. They desire you to offer unnecessary money to them! That’s not honest when they know industry trends that drastically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll share with 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 Bell Gardens. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Bell Gardens
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Bell Gardens is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, however you also do not 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 screw up your case and you wind up shelling out for their errors for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best task done at the most reasonable fee. That sensible fee is most likely not the lowest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Bell Gardens.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Bell Gardens
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still hire a regional Bell Gardens divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Bell Gardens?
- 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 Bell Gardens:
| 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 Bell Gardens:
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 has to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the whole country. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get totally free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe 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 maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were written guidelines 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 numerous hours long.
Don’t 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 hire {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 in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my many blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular 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 scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client testimonials 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested 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 often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add in new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Bell Gardens have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will protect 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 Bell Gardens:
- 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 Bell Gardens 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 Bell Gardens 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 previously covered this option above. This is the traditional option. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the noted reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a huge quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Bell Gardens
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.