Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Castro Valley | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Castro Valley?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Castro Valley. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a physician. However, wise customers typically don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry professional. That expert will be skilled, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more trustworthy, local attorneys.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t desire you to save cash. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not honest when they are aware of profession developments that significantly reduce your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Castro Valley. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Castro Valley
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Castro Valley is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you also 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you wind up paying for their mistakes for many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the best job done at the most reasonable cost. That reasonable cost is probably not the lowest expense, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Castro Valley.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Castro Valley
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still select a local Castro Valley divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently selected a lawyer, you are highly advised 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 informing you that one lawyer can care for 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 spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Castro Valley?
- 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 Castro Valley:
| 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 Castro Valley:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has actually
developed one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce treatment in the whole country. Just 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 free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 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 very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. 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 many hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY 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 published widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my various posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned website to accumulate phony client testimonials as though they were real reviews from genuine clients. It showed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review website 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 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 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 currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints 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 brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Castro Valley have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody 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 Castro Valley:
- 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 Castro Valley 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 Castro Valley 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 full traditional 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 however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to use this option, you are paying too much 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 Castro Valley
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.