Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Citrus Heights | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Citrus Heights?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Citrus Heights. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle 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 doctor. Nevertheless, clever consumers generally do not get any of those tasks done except by a local market professional. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional monitor agency. Simply put, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend too much 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 local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, regional lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments due to the fact that they don’t want you to save money. They desire you to give additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they are aware of industry developments that drastically lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to 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 Citrus Heights. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Citrus Heights
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Citrus Heights is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you likewise do not wish to give a small amount of money to someone 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 end up shelling out money for their mistakes for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the best job done at the most affordable price. That affordable expense is most likely not the smallest price, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. 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 use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Citrus Heights.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Citrus Heights
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional Citrus Heights divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter 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 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 spouse 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 Citrus Heights?
- 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 Citrus Heights:
| 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 Citrus Heights:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court site. But 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 does not indicate you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
made one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce procedure in the entire nation. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The directions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist 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 under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to repair 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 substantially in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of specific frauds we’ve discovered 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, 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 using a self-owned site to accumulate fake customer testimonials as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews when they do not.
Also, 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 fraudulent online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are 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 scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Citrus Heights have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one 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 Citrus Heights:
- 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 Citrus Heights 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 Citrus Heights 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 traditional alternative. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything 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 lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this option, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Citrus Heights
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.