Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Los Gatos | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Los Gatos?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Los Gatos. However do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a physician. However, clever customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local market professional. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional watchdog organization. Simply put, that professional is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they do not want you to conserve money. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not honest when they are aware of profession developments that dramatically lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Los Gatos. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Los Gatos
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Los Gatos is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you also don’t wish to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 end up financing their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole removed, you wish to get the very best job done at the most sensible cost. That affordable fee is probably not the smallest fee, but it is probably not far away from the lowest price. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Los Gatos.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Los Gatos
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still select a regional Los Gatos divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming 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 employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Los Gatos?
- 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 Gatos:
| 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 Gatos:
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 has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
made one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the entire country. Just Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free of charge forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 instructions. The directions 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 distinct. If there were written 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 many 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 hire {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 published substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my various blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer contracted one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular frauds we’ve identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to build up phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from genuine clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was also 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 very same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county 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 often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Los Gatos have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one 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 Los Gatos:
- 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 Gatos 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 Gatos 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 traditional choice. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted factors to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Los Gatos
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.