Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Oakley | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Oakley?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Oakley. However do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a physician. However, clever consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry specialist. That specialist will be competent, experienced and certified and licensed by a LOCAL watchdog organization. In other words, that specialist is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more trustworthy, regional lawyers.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t want you to conserve money. They desire you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not fair when they are aware of profession developments that considerably minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Oakley. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Oakley
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Oakley is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, however you also do not want to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 shelling out money for their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best task done at the most reasonable cost. That reasonable price is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Oakley.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Oakley
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a local Oakley divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has currently chosen a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Oakley?
- 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 Oakley:
| 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 Oakley:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court site. But 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 does not mean you’ll understand how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
created one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce process in the entire nation. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals 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 minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very 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 different. If there were written directions 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 under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many posts on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve discovered in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to build up fake customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, 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 complaints and their BBB scores 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 merely add brand-new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Oakley have indeed 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 Oakley:
- 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 Oakley 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 Oakley 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 have indeed already covered this alternative above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Oakley
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.