Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Cathedral City | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Cathedral City?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Cathedral City. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed 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, wise customers generally do not get any of those tasks done other than by a local market professional. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional monitor organization. To put it simply, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine concern. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local lawyers.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to save cash. They want you to give extra money to them! That’s not on the level when they are aware of industry developments that considerably lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to keep away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Cathedral City. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Cathedral City
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Cathedral City is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you also do not 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 money for their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most sensible expense. That affordable price is probably not the smallest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and expense.
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 Cathedral City.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Cathedral City
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Cathedral City divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently chosen a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed 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 cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Cathedral City?
- 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 Cathedral City:
| 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 Cathedral City:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not mean you’ll understand how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
developed one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce procedure in the whole country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
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 might get free of charge papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The directions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. 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.
Don’t fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot 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 written widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my various articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually recognized 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 biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to collect fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was likewise 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 exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews when they do not.
Likewise, look at 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 deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints 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 complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add in new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Cathedral City have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one 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 Cathedral City:
- 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 Cathedral City 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 Cathedral City 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 option above. This is the conventional alternative. This is full conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge 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 option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Cathedral City
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.