Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Manhattan Beach | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Manhattan Beach?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Manhattan Beach. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a physician. However, wise consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry specialist. That professional will be competent, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional monitor organization. Simply put, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, regional lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments because they don’t desire you to save cash. They want you to give additional money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession developments that drastically lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay clear of the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Manhattan Beach. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Manhattan Beach
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Manhattan Beach is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you likewise 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 ruin your case and you end up paying for their mistakes for several years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most reasonable expense. That sensible price is probably not the smallest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Manhattan Beach.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Manhattan Beach
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional Manhattan Beach divorce lawyer on full conventional 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 partner has currently hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already chosen a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Manhattan 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 Manhattan 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 Manhattan Beach:
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 papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
made one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the entire country. Only Vermont is harder.
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 could get free of cost forms 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 legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published guidelines 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 under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we’ve identified 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 largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to collect phony client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer 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 primarily out of state. A few are 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 will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores 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 guys simply add brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Manhattan Beach have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will protect 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 Manhattan 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 Manhattan 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 Manhattan 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’ve already covered this option above. This is the traditional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Manhattan 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.