Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Elk Grove | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Elk Grove?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Elk Grove. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car 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, smart customers usually don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local market specialist. That professional will be competent, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL monitor agency. Simply put, that expert 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 essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends since they don’t desire you to save cash. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession developments that dramatically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll inform 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 Elk Grove. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Elk Grove
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Elk Grove is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, but you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best job done at the most sensible expense. That sensible expense is most likely not the smallest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Elk Grove.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Elk Grove
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Elk Grove divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently employed a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Elk Grove?
- 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 Elk Grove:
| 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 Elk Grove:
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 because they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
made one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce treatment in the entire 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 could pick up cost-free forms 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 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The directions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is different. 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to fix than it would have cost for you to employ {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 extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my various posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author contracted one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up phony customer testimonials as though they were real reviews from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never ever 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 indeed moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing 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 amongst the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. 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 be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add in brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Elk Grove have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard 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 Elk Grove:
- 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 Elk Grove 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 Elk Grove 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 traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better sites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Elk Grove
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.