Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Clovis | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Clovis?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Clovis. But do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a medical professional. However, wise consumers typically do not get any of those tasks done except by a local industry specialist. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional monitor agency. Simply put, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. No one wants to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional lawyers.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends because they don’t want you to conserve cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not fair when they understand industry developments that considerably lower your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Clovis. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Clovis
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Clovis is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you also do not wish to pay a small amount of money to someone who will screw 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 mess up your case and you end up shelling out for their mistakes for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole removed, you want to get the very best task done at the most sensible price. That reasonable price is probably not the lowest fee, but it is probably not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Clovis.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Clovis
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional Clovis divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently contracted a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate problems, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Clovis?
- 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 Clovis:
| 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 Clovis:
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 has to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not indicate you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce process in the entire nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 of cost forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small 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 guidelines. 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 distinct. If there were written directions 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.
Do not fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 have indeed written extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific frauds we have actually identified in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from real clients. It showed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Clovis have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard you. Stay 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 Clovis:
- 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 Clovis 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 Clovis 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 already covered this option above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are a lot 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 use this alternative, you are overpaying by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Clovis
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.