Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Monterey | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Monterey?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Monterey. However do you truly want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a physician. Nevertheless, clever consumers typically don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry expert. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and licensed and regulated by a LOCAL monitor organization. In other words, that specialist is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local lawyers.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends due to the fact that they do not want you to conserve money. They want you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession trends that drastically reduce your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Monterey. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Monterey
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Monterey is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you also don’t want 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 screw up your case and you wind up shelling out money for their errors for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable expense. That sensible price is most likely not the lowest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Monterey.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Monterey
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional Monterey divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’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 complicated issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Monterey?
- 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 Monterey:
| 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 Monterey:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional 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. Even if you can download them does not imply you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
made one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce process in the entire nation. Just Vermont is more challenging.
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 free of cost forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small 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 forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. 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 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 numerous 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 hire {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 substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my various posts on online divorce scams. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular frauds we have actually recognized in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to accumulate phony customer testimonials as though they were real reviews from real customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews when they do not.
Also, 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local 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 currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add in brand-new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Monterey have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard 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 Monterey:
- 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 Monterey 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 Monterey 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 choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
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 noted factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Monterey
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.