Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Hercules | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Hercules?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Hercules. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired 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. Nevertheless, smart consumers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry specialist. That expert will be skilled, experienced and licensed and regulated by a LOCAL monitor agency. Simply put, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost 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 industry developments that have considerably cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, local lawyers.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they do not desire you to save money. They desire you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand profession developments that significantly decrease your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Hercules. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Hercules
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Hercules is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you likewise don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody 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 taking care of their errors for 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.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most sensible cost. That reasonable price is probably not the smallest cost, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. 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 idea (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Hercules.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Hercules
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still select a regional Hercules divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently selected a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Hercules?
- 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 Hercules:
| 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 Hercules:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Just because you can download them does not imply you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce process in the entire nation. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up totally free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on perhaps 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 furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were written instructions 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 under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my various blog posts on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply 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 absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up fake customer reviews as though they were real reviews from genuine clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website 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 exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several operate 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 complaints won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Hercules have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody 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 Hercules:
- 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 Hercules 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 Hercules 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 alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Hercules
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.