Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Concord | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Concord?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Concord. However do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a physician. Nevertheless, wise consumers usually do not get any of those jobs done other than by a local market professional. That specialist will be competent, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. To put it simply, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional attorneys.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to conserve money. They want you to provide extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession developments that dramatically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Concord. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Concord
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Concord is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, 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 ruin your case and you end up paying 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.
A lot of consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most affordable expense. That affordable cost is most likely not the smallest cost, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Concord.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Concord
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Concord divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently employed a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t 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 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 rapidly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Concord?
- 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 Concord:
| 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 Concord:
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 needs to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t indicate you’ll know how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most challenging divorce procedure in the entire country. Only Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free of cost forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms totaling 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 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 specific case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were written 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 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 hire {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 widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified writer contracted one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular frauds we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very 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 consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances 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 just add in new scams and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Concord have been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. Nobody 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 Concord:
- 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 Concord 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 Concord 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 choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge 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 option. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Concord
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.