Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Monterey Park | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Monterey Park?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Monterey Park. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. However, smart consumers normally don’t get any of those tasks done except by a local industry professional. That professional will be proficient, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog agency. To put it simply, that expert is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate issue. No one wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments due to the fact that they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not honest when they know profession trends that dramatically lower your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Monterey Park. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Monterey Park
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Monterey Park is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you likewise don’t want to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will screw up your divorce.
If you pay $300 or $400 to an unlicensed, unlicensed online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you wind up financing their mistakes for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, car fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the best task done at the most reasonable expense. That affordable fee is probably not the lowest fee, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest expense. Simply put, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Monterey Park.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Monterey Park
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still hire a local Monterey Park divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently employed a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Monterey 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 Monterey 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 Monterey Park:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional 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 mean you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the entire country. 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 could get free of cost documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen forms 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 exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY 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’ve published extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my numerous posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified author employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of specific frauds we have actually identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony client testimonials as though they were real testimonials from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were clients of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was also 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 exact same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial 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 genuine customer reviews 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 amongst the most swindling online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores 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 just add in brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Monterey Park have been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. Nobody 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 Monterey 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 Monterey 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 Monterey 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 already covered this option above. This is the conventional alternative. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to utilize this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Monterey 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.