Uncontested Divorce Lawyer East Palo Alto | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in East Palo Alto?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in East Palo Alto. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a medical professional. However, clever consumers usually do not get any of those tasks done other than by a local market specialist. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and certified and regulated by a regional monitor agency. Simply put, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional lawyers.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they do not desire you to conserve cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they know profession trends that considerably lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise 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 East Palo Alto. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in East Palo Alto
The expense of an uncontested divorce in East Palo Alto is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, however you likewise don’t wish to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 mess up your case and you end up paying for their errors for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole removed, you wish to get the very best task done at the most affordable fee. That affordable price is probably not the lowest expense, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals 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 idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in East Palo Alto.
Uncontested Divorce Process in East Palo Alto
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a regional East Palo Alto divorce lawyer on complete 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 spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has already contracted a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 East Palo Alto?
- 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 East Palo Alto:
| 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 East Palo Alto:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most complex divorce treatments in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the entire country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up totally free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were published guidelines 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 into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published extensively in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my various posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the most significant 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 build up fake client testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from genuine customers. It showed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing 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 amongst the most fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested 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 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 guys simply add brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in East Palo Alto have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will secure you. Stay 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 East Palo Alto:
- 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 East Palo Alto 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 East Palo Alto 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 full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior 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 better websites and are far more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed reasons to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in East Palo Alto
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.