Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Lancaster | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Lancaster?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Lancaster. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a physician. However, wise consumers typically do not get any of those jobs done except by a regional market professional. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional monitor organization. Simply put, that specialist is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wants to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they do not want you to conserve cash. They desire you to provide additional money to them! That’s not fair when they are aware of industry trends that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Lancaster. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Lancaster
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Lancaster is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, however you likewise do not want to give 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 mess up your case and you wind up shelling out money for their mistakes for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most affordable expense. That sensible expense is probably not the smallest expense, however it is probably not far away from the lowest expense. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Lancaster.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Lancaster
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still hire a regional Lancaster divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’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 complicated concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Lancaster?
- 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 Lancaster:
| 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 Lancaster:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Even if you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce procedure 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 cost forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The guidelines that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix than it would have cost for you to employ {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 widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my numerous articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular scams we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill industry.
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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake customer reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews when they do not.
Likewise, 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate 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 complaints will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in brand-new scams and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Lancaster have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one 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 Lancaster:
- 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 Lancaster 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 Lancaster 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 option above. This is the conventional choice. This is full traditional legal representation by a local 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 but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Lancaster
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.