Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Fairfield | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Fairfield?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Fairfield. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, smart customers normally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry expert. That professional will be skilled, experienced and certified and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. To put it simply, that expert is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional lawyers.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends because they don’t desire you to save cash. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession trends that significantly lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Fairfield. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Fairfield
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Fairfield is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you likewise do not want to give 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 ruin your case and you wind up taking care of their mistakes for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the best job done at the most affordable expense. That sensible fee is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the lowest 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 cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Fairfield.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Fairfield
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Fairfield divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not hired 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 Fairfield?
- 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 Fairfield:
| 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 Fairfield:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local 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 doesn’t mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce treatment in the entire nation. Just Vermont is harder.
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 get cost-free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor 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 documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were written 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 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 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’ve published widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular scams we have actually 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 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 website to collect fake client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily 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 currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Fairfield have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. Nobody 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 Fairfield:
- 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 Fairfield 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 Fairfield 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 traditional choice. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Fairfield
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.