Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Burlingame | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Burlingame?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Burlingame. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, clever consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional market expert. That professional will be competent, experienced and licensed and controlled by a LOCAL watchdog organization. In other words, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend too much on any product or service. However, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments because they do not want you to save money. They want you to offer unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know industry trends that dramatically lower 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 stay clear of the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Burlingame. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Burlingame
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Burlingame 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, however you likewise do not want 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 screw up your case and you end up financing their errors for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Most consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the very best task done at the most reasonable fee. That affordable expense is most likely not the smallest fee, but it is probably not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Burlingame.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Burlingame
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local Burlingame divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently contracted a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that 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 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 Burlingame?
- 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 Burlingame:
| 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 Burlingame:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Even if you can download them does not imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce procedure in the whole nation. Just Vermont is harder.
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 pick up free documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is different. If there were published 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my various articles on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams 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 largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to accumulate fake customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, 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 ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in brand-new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Burlingame have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 Burlingame:
- 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 Burlingame 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 Burlingame 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 alternative above. This is the conventional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Burlingame
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.