Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Laguna Niguel | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Laguna Niguel?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Laguna Niguel. However do you really want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. However, wise customers normally don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local market expert. That expert will be skilled, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. Simply put, that professional is liable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a genuine issue. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments because they don’t want you to conserve money. They want you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand industry developments that drastically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Laguna Niguel. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Laguna Niguel
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Laguna Niguel is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, however you likewise don’t wish to give 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 wind up shelling out for their mistakes for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the very best job done at the most sensible cost. That sensible price is most likely not the smallest cost, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Laguna Niguel.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Laguna Niguel
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a local Laguna Niguel divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your partner has currently contracted a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple 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 which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Laguna Niguel?
- 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 Laguna Niguel:
| 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 Laguna Niguel:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the entire country. Just Vermont is harder.
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 could pick up cost-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 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 very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The directions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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.
Do not fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my various posts on online divorce scams. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular scams we have actually pinpointed 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, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to collect fake customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was likewise 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 exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews 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 among the most deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody 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 be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add brand-new scams and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Laguna Niguel have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will protect 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 Laguna Niguel:
- 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 Laguna Niguel 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 Laguna Niguel 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 traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to use 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 amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Laguna Niguel
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.