Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Downey | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Downey?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Downey. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut 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 eliminated by someone who is not a doctor. However, wise customers generally do not get any of those jobs done other than by a regional market expert. That specialist will be competent, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional watchdog organization. To put it simply, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, regional lawyers.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they don’t want you to save cash. They want you to give extra money to them! That’s not fair when they know industry trends that dramatically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to keep away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Downey. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Downey
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Downey is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you likewise don’t want to pay 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 screw up your case and you end up paying for their mistakes for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most sensible price. That sensible fee is most likely not the smallest price, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest expense. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Downey.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Downey
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still hire a regional Downey divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already hired a lawyer.
If your partner has currently contracted a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated 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 complex concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Downey?
- 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 Downey:
| 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 Downey:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the whole nation. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up totally free documents from the court, dust off 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 different 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 guidelines 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 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 many hours long.
Do not fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published extensively before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my various posts on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular scams we have actually detected in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed 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 assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial site 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 exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 deceitful online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody 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 Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are usually “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 new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Downey have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 Downey:
- 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 Downey 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 Downey 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 alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional 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 (noted 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 reasons to use this option, you are overpaying by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Downey
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.