Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Modesto | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Modesto?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Modesto. However do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car repaired by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. However, wise customers generally do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional market expert. That professional will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and monitored by a regional monitor organization. To put it simply, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to spend too much on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, local attorneys.
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 give additional money to them! That’s not fair when they are aware of industry developments that considerably lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll share with 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 Modesto. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Modesto
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Modesto is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, but 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 wind up taking care of their errors for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole removed, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable expense. That reasonable expense is most likely not the smallest price, however it is probably not far away from the smallest price. Simply put, 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 idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Modesto.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Modesto
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a local Modesto divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is a really 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 already hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Modesto?
- 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 Modesto:
| 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 Modesto:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not indicate you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the entire nation. Only Vermont is harder.
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 could pick up free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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’ve published substantially in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my various posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular scams we have actually detected in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest 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 utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the phony testimonial site). That phony 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 deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer reviews when they do not.
Likewise, check out 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, 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 ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add brand-new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Modesto have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will secure you. Stay 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 Modesto:
- 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 Modesto 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 Modesto 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 option above. This is the conventional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need 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 excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Modesto
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.