Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Palm Desert | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Palm Desert?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Palm Desert. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. However, wise consumers normally do not get any of those jobs done except by a local industry professional. That expert will be skilled, experienced and certified and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wants to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, local lawyers.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends because they don’t want you to conserve cash. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not fair when they know profession developments that dramatically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Palm Desert. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Palm Desert
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Palm Desert is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you likewise 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 wind up financing their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best task done at the most reasonable expense. That sensible price is most likely not the lowest price, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals 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 sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Palm Desert.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Palm Desert
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still employ a regional Palm Desert divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already chosen a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Palm Desert?
- 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 Palm Desert:
| 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 Palm Desert:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents 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. Just because you can download them does not indicate you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce procedure in the entire nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free of charge forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. 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 distinct. If there were written guidelines 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.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to repair 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’ve written extensively in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my various blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific frauds we have actually detected in the online divorce mill industry.
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 designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to collect fake client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial rip-off 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 customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY sector. No one polices them. They are primarily 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 complaints and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Palm Desert have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one will protect you. Keep 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 Palm Desert:
- 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 Palm Desert 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 Palm Desert 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 traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large cost and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began 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 much better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a big amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Palm Desert
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.