Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Lake Forest | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Lake Forest?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Lake Forest. However do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local market specialist. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional monitor organization. In other words, that professional is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, regional lawyers.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments because they don’t want you to save cash. They want you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession trends that considerably reduce your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Lake Forest. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Lake Forest
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Lake Forest is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you likewise don’t wish to pay 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 wind up paying for their mistakes for several years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most reasonable price. That reasonable fee is probably not the smallest expense, but it is probably not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, 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 Lake Forest.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Lake Forest
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Lake Forest divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already employed a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward 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 issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 Lake Forest?
- 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 Lake Forest:
| 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 Lake Forest:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce treatment in the entire country. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 could pick up totally free papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The directions 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 distinct. If there were written directions 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 under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix 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’ve written extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my various articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author contracted one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific frauds we have actually detected in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate fake customer reviews as though they were real reviews from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was also 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 very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate 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 fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints 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 brand-new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Lake Forest have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will protect 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 Lake Forest:
- 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 Lake Forest 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 Lake Forest 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 option above. This is the conventional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however 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, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a big amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Lake Forest
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.