Uncontested Divorce Lawyer El Monte | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in El Monte?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in El Monte. But do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a doctor. However, clever consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional market specialist. That expert will be competent, experienced and licensed and controlled by a LOCAL watchdog agency. Simply put, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local lawyers.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments since they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They desire you to provide additional money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know profession trends that significantly minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in El Monte. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in El Monte
The cost of an uncontested divorce in El Monte is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you also do not want 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 for their errors for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole removed, you want to get the very best task done at the most sensible expense. That sensible fee is probably not the lowest cost, but it is probably not far away from the smallest fee. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy 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 concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in El Monte.
Uncontested Divorce Process in El Monte
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional El Monte divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently contracted a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in El Monte?
- 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 Monte:
| 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 Monte:
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 since they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
developed one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce process in the entire nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 might pick up free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines 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 different. If there were published directions 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.
Don’t fall into 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 contract {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 written substantially in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just 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 grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up fake client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers 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 among the most deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate 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 grievances won’t 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 deception pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in El Monte have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will protect 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 El Monte:
- 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 Monte 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 Monte 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’ve already covered this alternative above. This is the conventional alternative. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does every little thing 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 started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better sites 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. But if you do not have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, 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 El Monte
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.