Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Los Altos | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Los Altos?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Los Altos. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile 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 consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry expert. That professional will be proficient, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. No one wishes to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to conserve money. They want you to provide extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession developments that significantly decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Los Altos. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Los Altos
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Los Altos is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, but you also don’t wish to pay 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 end up taking care of their mistakes for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
A lot of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable cost. That sensible cost is probably not the smallest expense, but it is probably not far away from the smallest price. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Los Altos.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Los Altos
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a local Los Altos divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already employed a lawyer, you are strongly advised 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 informing you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 Los Altos?
- 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 Los Altos:
| 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 Los Altos:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most complex divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get totally free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help 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 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve written widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my numerous articles on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific frauds we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed 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 fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up fake client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client testimonials 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Los Altos have been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. No one will safeguard you. Keep 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 Los Altos:
- 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 Los Altos 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 Los Altos 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 alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the noted factors to use this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Los Altos
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.