Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Dana Point | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Dana Point?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Dana Point. But do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, wise customers usually do not get any of those tasks done other than by a local industry expert. That professional will be proficient, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog agency. Simply put, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, regional attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments since they don’t desire you to save cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know industry developments that significantly minimize your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay away from the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Dana Point. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Dana Point
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Dana Point is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, but 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you wind up paying for their mistakes for many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, car repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most reasonable price. That affordable cost is most likely not the lowest cost, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Dana Point.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Dana Point
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local Dana Point divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has already hired a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired 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 Dana Point?
- 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 Dana Point:
| 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 Dana Point:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not indicate you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most complex divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the entire nation. Just 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 pick up cost-free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 guidelines. The instructions 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 showed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be numerous hours long.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 extensively before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my various articles on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams 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 scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from genuine clients. It showed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate 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 will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings 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 new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Dana Point have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will protect 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 Dana Point:
- 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 Dana Point 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 Dana Point 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 already covered this alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. 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 deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed factors to use this option, you are paying too much by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Dana Point
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.