Uncontested Divorce Lawyer El Cerrito | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in El Cerrito?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in El Cerrito. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a physician. However, wise consumers typically do not get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry expert. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and certified and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. In other words, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends due to the fact that they do not desire you to conserve cash. They desire you to give additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession developments that drastically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll inform 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 Cerrito. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in El Cerrito
The expense of an uncontested divorce in El Cerrito is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, however you likewise don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody 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 ruin your case and you end up paying for their errors for several 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 smart.
Most divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, car fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most reasonable price. That reasonable price is probably not the lowest fee, but it is probably not far away from the smallest price. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in El Cerrito.
Uncontested Divorce Process in El Cerrito
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional El Cerrito divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in El Cerrito?
- 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 Cerrito:
| 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 Cerrito:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not indicate you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has actually
created one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the whole nation. Only Vermont is harder.
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 free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 directions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular 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 into the do it yourself 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 widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my many posts on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular frauds we’ve detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from genuine clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial website 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 same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews 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 among the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few are 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 will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add in new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in El Cerrito have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will protect 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 Cerrito:
- 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 Cerrito 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 Cerrito 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 traditional alternative. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in El Cerrito
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.