Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Merced | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Merced?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Merced. However do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle 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 somebody who is not a doctor. However, wise consumers generally do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry specialist. That professional will be skilled, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog organization. To put it simply, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends due to the fact that they don’t desire you to save cash. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand industry trends that dramatically lower your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Merced. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Merced
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Merced is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, however you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will screw 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 mess up your case and you end up taking care of their mistakes for several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Many consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most affordable price. That reasonable fee is most likely not the smallest cost, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Merced.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Merced
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local Merced divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently contracted a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not 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 that contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Merced?
- 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 Merced:
| 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 Merced:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms 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 forms. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce treatment in the whole 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 might pick up cost-free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page legal documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The directions 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 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.
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 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 have indeed written widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular frauds we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill industry.
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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to build up fake client testimonials as though they were real 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 sister site were customers 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 heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial rip-off 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 customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They currently 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 people just add in brand-new scams and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Merced have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. Nobody 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 Merced:
- 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 Merced 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 Merced 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 alternative above. This is the conventional option. This is complete conventional 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 but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed reasons to utilize 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 Merced
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.