Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Fresno | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Fresno?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Fresno. However do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, smart consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry professional. That specialist will be competent, experienced and certified and monitored by a LOCAL monitor agency. In other words, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, 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 used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, regional lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments since they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They want you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand industry trends that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Fresno. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Fresno
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Fresno is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, but you also do not wish to pay 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 end up taking care of their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very costly 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 got rid of, you wish to get the very best job done at the most reasonable fee. That affordable fee is probably not the lowest price, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest 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 best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Fresno.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Fresno
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local Fresno divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is a really high dollar value 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 strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Fresno?
- 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 Fresno:
| 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 Fresno:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Just because you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most complex divorce procedures in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the whole nation. Only Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could pick up free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. 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 different. If there were written guidelines 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.
Do not fall into 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 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’ve published widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve pinpointed 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, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to collect phony client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer reviews when they do not.
Likewise, check 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 mostly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add in new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Fresno have indeed been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. Nobody will secure 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 Fresno:
- 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 Fresno 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 Fresno 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 option above. This is the traditional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee 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 alternative. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the noted factors 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 Fresno
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.