Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Goleta | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Goleta?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Goleta. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a hairstyle 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 somebody who is not a medical professional. However, clever consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry professional. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have considerably cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local lawyers.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to save cash. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession trends that considerably reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Goleta. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Goleta
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Goleta is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you also don’t want to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 mess up your case and you end up shelling out for their errors for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best job done at the most reasonable price. That sensible cost is probably not the smallest cost, but it is probably not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Goleta.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Goleta
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Goleta divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently selected a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex issues, 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 choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Goleta?
- 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 Goleta:
| 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 Goleta:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the whole country. Just Vermont is more challenging.
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 totally free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small 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 forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The directions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually 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, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review 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.
Also, 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, 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 grievances and their BBB ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in brand-new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Goleta have indeed been getting screwed for decades, 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 Goleta:
- 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 Goleta 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 Goleta 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 previously covered this option above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local 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 deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted 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 overpaying by a big amount. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Goleta
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.