Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Rancho Palos Verdes | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Rancho Palos Verdes?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Rancho Palos Verdes. However do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile repaired by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a medical professional. However, smart customers generally don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local market professional. That specialist will be competent, experienced and certified and regulated by a regional monitor agency. Simply put, that expert is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends because they do not want you to save money. They want you to give additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they understand industry developments that dramatically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Rancho Palos Verdes. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Rancho Palos Verdes
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Rancho Palos Verdes is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you likewise do not wish 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 screw up your case and you wind up shelling out for their mistakes for 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.
A lot of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable expense. That reasonable cost is probably not the smallest price, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest fee. Simply put, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Rancho Palos Verdes
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still select a regional Rancho Palos Verdes divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Rancho Palos Verdes?
- 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 Rancho Palos Verdes:
| 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 Rancho Palos Verdes:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Even if you can download them doesn’t mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the entire nation. Just Vermont is harder.
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 get free of charge documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 instructions. The directions 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 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.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair than it would have cost for you to contract {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’ve written extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my numerous blog posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we’ve 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 largest divorce mill in California. It was designated 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 phony customer testimonials as though they were real testimonials from genuine clients. It showed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county 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 grievances and their BBB scores are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Rancho Palos Verdes have indeed 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 Rancho Palos Verdes:
- 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 Rancho Palos Verdes 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 Rancho Palos Verdes 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 option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are far 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 listed factors to utilize this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Rancho Palos Verdes
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.