Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Palmdale | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Palmdale?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Palmdale. However do you truly want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a physician. However, wise consumers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local industry specialist. That professional will be competent, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional monitor agency. Simply put, that professional is liable locally.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, regional attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t want you to save money. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they know industry trends that significantly decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Palmdale. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Palmdale
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Palmdale is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you also 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you wind up financing their errors for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most reasonable fee. That reasonable fee is most likely not the lowest cost, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Palmdale.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Palmdale
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still employ a local Palmdale divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has currently selected a lawyer, you are highly recommended 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 spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Palmdale?
- 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 Palmdale:
| 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 Palmdale:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local 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. Just because you can download them does not imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
created one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is more difficult.
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 cost-free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published 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 many hours long.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my many articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a professional author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular 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 outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up phony client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were customers of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was likewise 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 scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer reviews when they do not.
Also, 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 amongst the most deceptive online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few 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 almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Palmdale have been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will safeguard 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 Palmdale:
- 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 Palmdale 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 Palmdale 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 alternative above. This is the conventional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. 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 far better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Palmdale
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.