Uncontested Divorce Lawyer San Francisco | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in San Francisco?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in San Francisco. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, smart customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry expert. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog organization. Simply put, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t want you to conserve money. They want you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they know profession trends that drastically lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in San Francisco. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in San Francisco
The cost of an uncontested divorce in San Francisco is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to pay too much, but you also don’t wish to pay a small amount of money to someone who will screw 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 wind up shelling out money for their errors for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, car repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most sensible fee. That reasonable price is probably not the lowest cost, however it is probably not far away from the lowest price. To put it simply, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in San Francisco.
Uncontested Divorce Process in San Francisco
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional San Francisco divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has currently selected a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in San Francisco?
- 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 Francisco:
| 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 Francisco:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most challenging divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms totaling 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 same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. 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 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 do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to repair 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific frauds we’ve identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted 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 assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up phony customer reviews as though they were real reviews from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was likewise 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 same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake testimonial website to another server. Today, 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 deceptive online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are primarily 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 rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add in new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in San Francisco have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will protect 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 Francisco:
- 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 Francisco 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 Francisco 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 alternative above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this option, you are overpaying by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in San Francisco
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.