Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Pleasant Hill | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Pleasant Hill?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Pleasant Hill. However do you really 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 gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, wise consumers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional market expert. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. To put it simply, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local lawyers.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t want you to save cash. They want you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not honest when they understand industry developments that drastically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll share with 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 Pleasant Hill. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Pleasant Hill
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Pleasant Hill is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, but you also do not 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 screw up your case and you end up financing their errors for several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the best task done at the most affordable price. That affordable cost is most likely not the smallest price, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Pleasant Hill.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Pleasant Hill
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local Pleasant Hill divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently hired a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Pleasant Hill?
- 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 Pleasant Hill:
| 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 Pleasant Hill:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Even if you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most complex divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the whole nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes 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 instructions 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.
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 select {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 written widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my many blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific frauds we have actually recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed 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 reviews from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial fraud over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine 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 among the most fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several 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 grievances won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Pleasant Hill have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody 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 Pleasant Hill:
- 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 Pleasant Hill 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 Pleasant Hill 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 traditional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have better sites and are far more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed 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 huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Pleasant Hill
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.