Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Benicia | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Benicia?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Benicia. But do you actually want 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. Nevertheless, clever consumers typically do not get any of those jobs done except by a regional market specialist. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have dramatically 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 honest, local attorneys.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they don’t want you to save money. They desire you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not reputable when they understand profession trends that dramatically lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Benicia. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Benicia
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Benicia is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, but you also don’t wish to give 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 mess up your case and you wind up shelling out for their errors for many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most reasonable price. That reasonable price is probably not the smallest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest fee. 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 best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Benicia.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Benicia
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional Benicia divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value 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 highly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Benicia?
- 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 Benicia:
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 Benicia:
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 because they are public papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest 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 procedures in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce process in the whole nation. Only 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 cost-free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. 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 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.
Do not fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my various articles on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified writer hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular frauds we’ve detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several 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 won’t 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 deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Benicia have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will safeguard you. Keep 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 Benicia:
- 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 Benicia 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 Benicia 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 conventional option. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed 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 Benicia
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
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