Uncontested Divorce Lawyer California | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in California?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in California. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a medical professional. However, smart customers usually do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional market specialist. That specialist will be competent, experienced and certified and controlled by a LOCAL monitor organization. Simply put, that specialist is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local attorneys.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they do not desire you to conserve cash. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession trends that drastically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in California. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in California
The cost of an uncontested divorce in California is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, however you likewise don’t wish 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 ruin your case and you wind up financing their mistakes 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 wise.
The majority of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable cost. That affordable price is most likely not the smallest price, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest fee. Simply put, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in California.
Uncontested Divorce Process in California
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional California divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently hired a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in California?
- 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 California:
| 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 California:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most challenging divorce procedure in the whole country. Only 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 could pick up free of cost documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines 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 unique. If there were published 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written extensively in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular scams we’ve detected in the online divorce mill industry.
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 assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to collect phony customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine clients. It showed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website 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 wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, 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 amongst the most deceitful online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody 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 complaints will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in California have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard 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 California:
- 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 California 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 California 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 already covered this alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous 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 far better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in California
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.