Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Berkeley | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Berkeley?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Berkeley. However do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a doctor. However, smart customers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local market expert. That expert will be proficient, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that specialist is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, local lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not fair when they are aware of profession trends that dramatically decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Berkeley. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Berkeley
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Berkeley is NOT just 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 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you end up taking care of their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
A lot of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most affordable expense. That sensible cost is most likely not the smallest price, but it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Berkeley.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Berkeley
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Berkeley divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already contracted a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, 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 options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Berkeley?
- 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 Berkeley:
| 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 Berkeley:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers 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 know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the whole country. Only Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many people 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 small children, on possibly 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 possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The guidelines 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 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.
Do not fall into 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 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’ve written substantially in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not simply take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified writer contracted one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we have actually discovered 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 largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to build up fake customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the phony testimonial site). That fake 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 exact same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (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 hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 among the most swindling 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 have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Berkeley have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 Berkeley:
- 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 Berkeley 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 Berkeley 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 previously covered this alternative above. This is the traditional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are overpaying 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 Berkeley
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.