Uncontested Divorce Lawyer San Diego | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in San Diego?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in San Diego. However do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, wise consumers usually don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a local industry professional. That professional will be proficient, experienced and licensed and regulated by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wants to spend too much on any product or service. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession trends that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments due to the fact that they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession developments that considerably decrease your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in San Diego. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in San Diego
The expense of an uncontested divorce in San Diego is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you likewise don’t wish to give 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 ruin your case and you wind up paying for their errors for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car repaired or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best task done at the most sensible price. That reasonable fee is probably not the lowest expense, but it is probably not far away from the smallest expense. Simply put, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in San Diego.
Uncontested Divorce Process in San Diego
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still employ a regional San Diego divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex problems, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently employed a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 San Diego?
- 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 Diego:
| 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 Diego:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t indicate you’ll know how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
made one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could pick up totally free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. 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 different. If there were written guidelines 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 DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 have indeed published widely in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply among my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular scams we’ve recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest 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 site to collect fake client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were customers of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was also 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 fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client 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 fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, 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 ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add in brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in San Diego have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody will secure 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 San Diego:
- 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 Diego 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 Diego 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 option above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed factors to use this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in San Diego
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.