Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Pleasanton | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Pleasanton?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Pleasanton. But do you truly want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed 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 medical professional. Nevertheless, wise customers generally do not get any of those jobs done except by a local industry specialist. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and certified and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are only being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, local attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they do not want you to conserve money. They want you to offer additional money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand profession developments that considerably lower your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals 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 Pleasanton. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Pleasanton
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Pleasanton is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you likewise do not want to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will mess 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 taking care of their errors for many 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 wise.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle repaired or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best job done at the most affordable expense. That sensible cost is most likely not the smallest expense, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Pleasanton.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Pleasanton
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still select a regional Pleasanton divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently selected a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate problems, 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 cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Pleasanton?
- 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 Pleasanton:
| 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 Pleasanton:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
created one of the most complex divorce treatments in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the whole country. Just Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could pick up free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. 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 different. If there were published directions 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.
Do not fall into the DIY 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 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. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified author hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific 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 absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned website to build up phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial deception 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 consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 business. 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 have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add in new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Pleasanton have been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. No one 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 Pleasanton:
- 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 Pleasanton 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 Pleasanton 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 choice. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does everything in the 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 lawyers’ 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 websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Pleasanton
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.