Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Desert Hot Springs | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Desert Hot Springs?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Desert Hot Springs. But do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. However, clever consumers normally don’t get any of those tasks done except by a regional industry professional. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and licensed and controlled by a regional monitor organization. In other words, that professional is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local attorneys.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they do not want you to save money. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not on the level when they know profession developments that considerably reduce your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Desert Hot Springs. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Desert Hot Springs
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Desert Hot Springs is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, but you likewise don’t 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, unlicensed online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they screw up your case and you wind up shelling out money for their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Many consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most affordable cost. That sensible cost is most likely not the smallest fee, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Desert Hot Springs.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Desert Hot Springs
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a regional Desert Hot Springs divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has already chosen a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming 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 hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Desert Hot Springs?
- 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 Desert Hot Springs:
| 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 Desert Hot Springs:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Even if you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce process in the whole nation. Just Vermont is tougher.
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 could get free of charge documents from the court, rev up 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 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines 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 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 select {a city} online divorce lawyer in the first place (see below). Going it alone in California divorce nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my many posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens 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 absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to accumulate fake client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was likewise 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 exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 among the most deceptive 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 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 grievances and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Desert Hot Springs have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody 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 Desert Hot Springs:
- 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 Desert Hot Springs 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 Desert Hot Springs 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 previously covered this alternative above. This is the conventional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize 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 overpaying by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Desert Hot Springs
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.