Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Pacifica | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Pacifica?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Pacifica. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, wise consumers normally do not get any of those jobs done other than by a local industry professional. That expert will be skilled, experienced and certified and licensed by a LOCAL watchdog organization. In other words, that specialist is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends since they do not desire you to conserve money. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not fair when they are aware of industry developments that drastically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Pacifica. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Pacifica
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Pacifica is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 end up shelling out for their errors for several years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, car repaired or mole removed, you want to get the very best job done at the most sensible cost. That reasonable fee is probably not the smallest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Pacifica.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Pacifica
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Pacifica divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not contracted 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 Pacifica?
- 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 Pacifica:
| 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 Pacifica:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most complicated divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment 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 documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The directions 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 published instructions 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.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 have indeed published substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my numerous posts on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular scams we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to collect fake customer testimonials 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 exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not wise.
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 fake review website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, look at 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY sector. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several operate 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 won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add brand-new scams and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Pacifica have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will protect you. Stay away from unlicensed, uncontrolled 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 Pacifica:
- 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 Pacifica 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 Pacifica 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 previously covered this option above. This is the traditional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large cost and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ 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 far better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to use this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Pacifica
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.