Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Riverside | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Riverside?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Riverside. However do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, wise customers generally do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry professional. That professional will be competent, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that expert is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments because they don’t desire you to save cash. They want you to offer extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand profession trends that drastically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll tell 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 Riverside. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Riverside
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Riverside is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you likewise don’t 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, unlicensed online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they screw up your case and you end up shelling out for their mistakes for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole removed, you want to get the best task done at the most sensible fee. That reasonable cost is probably not the lowest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret 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 Riverside.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Riverside
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still employ a regional Riverside divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate problems, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already chosen a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not 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 complex problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Riverside?
- 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 Riverside:
| 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 Riverside:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most complex divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most challenging divorce process in the whole nation. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen forms totaling 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 exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. 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 unique. If there were published instructions 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 many hours long.
Do not 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of specific scams we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted 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 problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from genuine clients. It showed that the fake testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was also 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 exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client testimonials 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 industry. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate 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 won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Riverside have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. Nobody will protect 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 Riverside:
- 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 Riverside 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 Riverside 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 already covered this option above. This is the conventional choice. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted factors to use this option, you are paying too much by a big amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Riverside
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.