Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Irvine | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Irvine?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Irvine. But do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, clever customers normally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry professional. That professional will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and monitored by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends since they do not want you to conserve money. They want you to offer extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession trends that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Irvine. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Irvine
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Irvine is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you also don’t want to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will screw 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 wind up taking care of their errors for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most reasonable cost. That sensible fee is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the smallest expense. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Irvine.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Irvine
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Irvine divorce lawyer on full 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 spouse has indeed already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming 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 indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Irvine?
- 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 Irvine:
| 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 Irvine:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Even if you can download them does not indicate you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
developed one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce process in the entire country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get totally free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions 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 different. 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix 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 substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular scams we have actually detected in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted 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 showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to build up phony client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer 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 among the most dishonest online services that exist in ANY business sector. 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 Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add in new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Irvine have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will protect you. Keep 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 Irvine:
- 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 Irvine 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 Irvine 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 have indeed previously covered this option above. This is the conventional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted 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 Irvine
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.