Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Long Beach | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Long Beach?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Long Beach. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, wise consumers usually do not get any of those jobs done other than by a regional market expert. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL monitor organization. In other words, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wants to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends since they don’t want you to conserve money. They desire you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession developments that drastically lower your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Long Beach. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Long Beach
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Long Beach is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, 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, unlicensed online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you wind up paying for their errors for many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most affordable expense. That sensible fee is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Long Beach.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Long Beach
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Long Beach divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Long Beach?
- 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 Long Beach:
| 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 Long Beach:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not mean you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most challenging divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce treatment in the entire country. Just Vermont is more challenging.
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 get free of charge documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen forms 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 very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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.
Do not fall under 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 contract {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 in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified author hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular frauds we have actually identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up phony client testimonials 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 revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website 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 same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews when they do not.
Also, 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY sector. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are usually “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 scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Long Beach have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 Long Beach:
- 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 Long Beach 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 Long Beach 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 previously covered this option above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large cost and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a big amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Long Beach
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.