Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Menlo Park | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Menlo Park?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Menlo Park. However do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, clever consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry expert. That professional will be proficient, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional monitor organization. In other words, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, local attorneys.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t desire you to conserve money. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they know industry trends that dramatically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Menlo Park. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Menlo Park
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Menlo Park is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you likewise 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 ruin your case and you end up paying for their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Many divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best task done at the most reasonable price. That reasonable cost is probably not the smallest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Menlo Park.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Menlo Park
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional Menlo Park divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse 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 cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Menlo Park?
- 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 Menlo Park:
| 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 Menlo Park:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Just because you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most complex divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce procedure in the whole nation. Just Vermont is tougher.
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 pick up free of charge forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen legal documents totaling 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 provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is different. If there were written instructions 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 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 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 have indeed written substantially in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my various articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we have actually recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect fake customer testimonials as though they were real reviews from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website 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 very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer 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 among the most swindling online services that exist in ANY industry. No one 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 won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB rankings 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 new scams and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Menlo Park have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one 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 Menlo Park:
- 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 Menlo Park 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 Menlo Park 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 alternative above. This is the traditional choice. This is full conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Menlo Park
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.