Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Ridgecrest | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Ridgecrest?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Ridgecrest. But do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut 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 eliminated by someone who is not a physician. However, smart consumers normally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry specialist. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and monitored by a LOCAL monitor organization. To put it simply, that professional is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wants to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have considerably cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends because they do not want you to save cash. They desire you to give extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand industry developments that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Ridgecrest. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Ridgecrest
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Ridgecrest is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, however you also do not 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 wind up paying for their errors 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.
Many divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto fixed or mole removed, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable fee. That reasonable expense is most likely not the smallest price, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest fee. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Ridgecrest.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Ridgecrest
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local Ridgecrest divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already chosen a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer informing you that a single lawyer can take care of 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 partner has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Ridgecrest?
- 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 Ridgecrest:
| 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 Ridgecrest:
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 since they are public forms. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
made one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce process in the entire country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
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 might get totally free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps 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 maybe 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 offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published 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 DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my numerous posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not simply 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 simply one of the lots of particular scams we’ve 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 fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to collect fake client testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from real clients. It showed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review website to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews when they do not.
Likewise, check out 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county 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 grievances and their BBB scores are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add in new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce customers in Ridgecrest have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will secure you. Keep away from unlicensed, uncontrolled 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 Ridgecrest:
- 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 Ridgecrest 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 Ridgecrest 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’ve previously covered this alternative above. This is the traditional alternative. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge 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 Ridgecrest
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.