Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Salinas | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Salinas?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Salinas. But do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, smart customers typically don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional market specialist. That professional will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and licensed by a regional monitor organization. To put it simply, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession trends that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, regional attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments since they do not want you to conserve cash. They desire you to offer unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand profession trends that drastically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Salinas. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Salinas
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Salinas is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you also don’t wish to give a small amount of money to someone 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 end up shelling out for their errors for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most sensible cost. That affordable fee is probably not the smallest fee, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Salinas.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Salinas
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Salinas divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer despite how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Salinas?
- 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 Salinas:
| 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 Salinas:
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 has to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has
made one of the most challenging divorce treatments in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce process in the entire 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 get free of cost documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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 many hours long.
Do not fall into 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 have indeed published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my many articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to collect fake customer reviews as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial site). 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 scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several 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 grievances won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Salinas have been getting screwed for decades, 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 Salinas:
- 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 Salinas 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 Salinas 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 alternative. This is complete conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Salinas
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.