Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Lafayette | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Lafayette?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Lafayette. But do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. However, smart consumers typically don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional market specialist. That professional will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and monitored by a regional watchdog organization. Simply put, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends since they don’t want you to conserve cash. They desire you to give extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know profession developments that considerably reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to keep away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Lafayette. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Lafayette
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Lafayette is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you also do not wish to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 screw up your case and you end up paying for their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable expense. That affordable expense is probably not the smallest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Lafayette.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Lafayette
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Lafayette divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated problems, 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 indeed already selected a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not contracted 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 Lafayette?
- 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 Lafayette:
| 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 Lafayette:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has actually
developed one of the most complex divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most challenging divorce process in the entire nation. Just Vermont is more difficult.
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 might get totally free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen documents amounting to 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 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 many hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to repair than it would have cost for you to select {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 substantially in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my numerous blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we’ve 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 fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest 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 using a self-owned website to accumulate phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were customers of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial fraud 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 consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county 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 already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Lafayette have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will safeguard you. Stay 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 Lafayette:
- 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 Lafayette 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 Lafayette 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 already covered this alternative above. This is the conventional alternative. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Lafayette
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.