Uncontested Divorce Lawyer San Bernardino | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in San Bernardino?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in San Bernardino. But do you truly want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a doctor. However, clever consumers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local market specialist. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and licensed by a regional monitor agency. To put it simply, that specialist is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they do not want you to save cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand industry developments that dramatically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll inform 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 San Bernardino. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in San Bernardino
The cost of an uncontested divorce in San Bernardino is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you end up paying for their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be an extremely 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 wish to get the best job done at the most affordable fee. That reasonable expense is most likely not the smallest price, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in San Bernardino.
Uncontested Divorce Process in San Bernardino
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local San Bernardino divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already contracted a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated 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 care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 San Bernardino?
- 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 San Bernardino:
| 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 San Bernardino:
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 documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most complex divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce process in the entire 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 might pick up cost-free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The directions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair than it would have cost for you to hire {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 extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my various blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer contracted one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve discovered in the online divorce mill market.
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 designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to collect fake client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys 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 indeed moved the fake review website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer 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 amongst the most deceptive online services that exist in ANY sector. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will be interested 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 deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in San Bernardino have been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will safeguard 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 San Bernardino:
- 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 San Bernardino 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 San Bernardino 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 very 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 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 deceitful online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed factors to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a substantial quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in San Bernardino
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.