Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Ontario | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Ontario?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Ontario. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, smart customers normally don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local industry expert. That expert will be skilled, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional watchdog agency. To put it simply, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wants to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, regional lawyers.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends due to the fact that they don’t want you to save money. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession developments that considerably reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Ontario. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Ontario
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Ontario is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you also don’t wish to give 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 ruin your case and you end up shelling out money for their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Many divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best job done at the most affordable expense. That reasonable fee is most likely not the smallest price, however it is probably not far away from the smallest price. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The secret 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 Ontario.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Ontario
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local Ontario divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has already employed a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse 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 Ontario?
- 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 Ontario:
| 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 Ontario:
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 has to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Even if you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has actually
made one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most challenging divorce process in the entire country. Only Vermont is harder.
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 pick up free of cost forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair 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 substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my numerous articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to collect fake client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial rip-off 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 consumers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client testimonials 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local 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 already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Ontario 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 Ontario:
- 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 Ontario 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 Ontario 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 traditional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large cost and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted factors to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Ontario
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.