Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Lakewood | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Lakewood?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Lakewood. However do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, smart consumers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry expert. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL monitor agency. To put it simply, that expert is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wishes to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, regional lawyers.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they know profession developments that significantly decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Lakewood. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Lakewood
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Lakewood is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you also don’t want to give a small amount of money to someone 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 financing their mistakes for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best task done at the most affordable cost. That reasonable cost is probably not the smallest expense, however it is probably not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Lakewood.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Lakewood
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still employ a local Lakewood divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Lakewood?
- 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 Lakewood:
| 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 Lakewood:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce treatment in the whole nation. Just Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free of charge papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on maybe a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. 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 unique. If there were published guidelines 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot 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 have indeed written widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my various posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, check 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY 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 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 deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Lakewood have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody 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 Lakewood:
- 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 Lakewood 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 Lakewood 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 traditional choice. This is full conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Lakewood
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.