Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Hawthorne | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Hawthorne?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Hawthorne. However do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a medical professional. However, wise customers generally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional market expert. That expert will be competent, experienced and licensed and controlled by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wants to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends due to the fact that they do not want you to conserve cash. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand profession developments that significantly decrease your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to keep away from the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Hawthorne. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Hawthorne
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Hawthorne is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, but you also do not 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 ruin your case and you end up financing their mistakes for 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 smart.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle repaired or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most sensible fee. That affordable cost is most likely not the lowest expense, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Hawthorne.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Hawthorne
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a regional Hawthorne divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate issues, 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 currently hired a lawyer, you are highly recommended 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 a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Hawthorne?
- 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 Hawthorne:
| 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 Hawthorne:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. 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 indicate you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce process in the entire country. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free of cost documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. 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 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my various posts on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest 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 website to collect phony client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site 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 same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews 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 amongst the most deceptive online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few operate 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 already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Hawthorne have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. Nobody will secure 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 Hawthorne:
- 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 Hawthorne 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 Hawthorne 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 option. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a 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, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this option, you are overpaying by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Hawthorne
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.