Uncontested Divorce Lawyer El Cajon | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in El Cajon?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in El Cajon. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a doctor. However, clever customers usually do not get any of those jobs done other than by a local industry expert. That professional will be competent, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional monitor organization. To put it simply, that expert is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, regional attorneys.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends due to the fact that they do not want you to save money. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know profession developments that considerably decrease your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in El Cajon. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in El Cajon
The expense of an uncontested divorce in El Cajon is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you also do not want to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 end up shelling out money for their mistakes for several 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 divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole removed, you wish to get the very best job done at the most sensible expense. That affordable fee is probably not the lowest expense, but it is probably not far away from the smallest fee. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in El Cajon.
Uncontested Divorce Process in El Cajon
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a regional El Cajon divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has already employed a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in El Cajon?
- 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 El Cajon:
| 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 El Cajon:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not imply you’ll understand how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce process in the entire country. Just Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get cost-free papers 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 perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The guidelines that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is different. If there were published 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix 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 have indeed published substantially in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we’ve discovered 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 complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to collect phony customer reviews as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials 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 amongst the most dishonest online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints 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 make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce customers in El Cajon have been getting screwed for many years, and no one 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 El Cajon:
- 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 El Cajon 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 El Cajon 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 alternative. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this option, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in El Cajon
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.