Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Richmond | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Richmond?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Richmond. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a doctor. However, wise customers typically don’t get any of those tasks done except by a regional industry professional. That specialist will be competent, experienced and certified and regulated by a regional monitor organization. In other words, that professional is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, regional attorneys.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to give extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession developments that drastically decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to stay clear of the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Richmond. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Richmond
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Richmond is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, however you also don’t want to give a small amount of money to someone who will mess 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 ruin your case and you end up financing their errors for many years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best task done at the most sensible cost. That reasonable cost is most likely not the smallest expense, but it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Richmond.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Richmond
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Richmond divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently employed a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not contracted 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 Richmond?
- 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 Richmond:
| 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 Richmond:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public papers. Just because you can download them does not suggest you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has actually
made one of the most complex divorce procedures in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most challenging divorce procedure in the whole nation. Just Vermont is more challenging.
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 could get cost-free documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix 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’ve published extensively before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what happened 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 particular frauds we have actually identified 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, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony customer testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real customers. It showed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise 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 very same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer reviews when they do not.
Likewise, 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 among the most swindling online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mainly 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 currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are usually “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 new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Richmond have been getting screwed for many years, 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 Richmond:
- 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 Richmond 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 Richmond 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 alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ 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 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. However if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Richmond
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.