Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Petaluma | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Petaluma?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Petaluma. However do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, wise customers generally don’t get any of those tasks done except by a local market professional. That expert will be competent, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional attorneys.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends since they don’t desire you to conserve money. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they are aware of industry developments that drastically minimize your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Petaluma. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Petaluma
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Petaluma is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, however you likewise do not wish to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 screw up your case and you end up taking care of their mistakes for several 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 wise.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile repaired or mole removed, you wish to get the very best task done at the most sensible cost. That affordable expense is most likely not the smallest cost, however it is probably not far away from the smallest fee. To put it simply, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Petaluma.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Petaluma
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still hire a regional Petaluma divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently hired a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed 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 Petaluma?
- 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 Petaluma:
| 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 Petaluma:
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 since they are public forms. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the entire nation. Only Vermont is more difficult.
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 cost-free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page legal documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were written directions 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 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my many posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually detected 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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony client testimonials as though they were real testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related 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 wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate 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 amongst the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add brand-new scams and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Petaluma have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. Nobody will safeguard 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 Petaluma:
- 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 Petaluma 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 Petaluma 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 regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are far more competitive than lawyers.
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 quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Petaluma
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.