Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Martinez | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Martinez?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Martinez. However do you truly wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, clever consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local market specialist. That specialist will be competent, experienced and licensed and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog organization. To put it simply, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, local lawyers.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they do not want you to save money. They want you to offer unnecessary money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they know industry developments that considerably lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Martinez. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Martinez
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Martinez is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you end up taking care of their errors for many 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 wise.
Many consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto repaired or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most reasonable cost. That reasonable fee is probably not the smallest cost, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Martinez.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Martinez
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local Martinez divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently chosen a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex 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 alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Martinez?
- 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 Martinez:
| 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 Martinez:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t indicate you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has indeed
created one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce procedure in the entire nation. Just Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get cost-free forms from the court, dust off 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 documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The directions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific 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 into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair than it would have cost for you to employ {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 widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular frauds we’ve pinpointed in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate phony client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
I never ever 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 phony 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 genuine customer testimonials 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 business sector. Nobody polices them. They are mainly 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 already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are often “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 in new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Martinez have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody 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 Martinez:
- 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 Martinez 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 Martinez 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 complete 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 way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior 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 far better websites and are much 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 reasons to use this option, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Martinez
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.