Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Los Angeles | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Los Angeles?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Los Angeles. However do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car repaired 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 customers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local market expert. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog agency. Simply put, that specialist is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments because they do not desire you to conserve cash. They desire you to give additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they know industry trends that drastically 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 stay away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Los Angeles. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Los Angeles
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Los Angeles is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you likewise don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 for their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best job done at the most affordable expense. That reasonable expense is most likely not the smallest fee, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Los Angeles.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Los Angeles
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Los Angeles divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already chosen a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one 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 quickly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Los Angeles?
- 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 Angeles:
| 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 Angeles:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. However 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 doesn’t mean you’ll know how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
made one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the entire nation. Only 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 pick up cost-free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen 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 exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California provides 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall into the DIY 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’ve written substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my many blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But do not simply take our word. Here is what took place 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 scams we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright 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 fraud. It was using a self-owned website to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review 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 genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are 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 ratings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Los Angeles have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 Angeles:
- 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 Angeles 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 Angeles 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 previously covered this option above. This is the conventional alternative. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a huge 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 Angeles
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.