Uncontested Divorce Lawyer San Luis Obispo | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in San Luis Obispo?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in San Luis Obispo. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut 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 eliminated by somebody who is not a physician. However, smart customers normally do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional market expert. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and regulated by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local lawyers.
A lot of attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand profession developments that drastically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to keep away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in San Luis Obispo. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in San Luis Obispo
The cost of an uncontested divorce in San Luis Obispo is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you also do not wish to pay 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 financing their errors for many 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.
Many consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the best job done at the most affordable cost. That affordable expense is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. To put it simply, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in San Luis Obispo.
Uncontested Divorce Process in San Luis Obispo
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still employ a regional San Luis Obispo divorce lawyer on complete conventional 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 currently employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently selected a lawyer, you are highly recommended 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 telling you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 Luis Obispo?
- 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 Luis Obispo:
| 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 Luis Obispo:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not imply you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has actually
created one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce treatment in the entire country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might pick up free of cost forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 guidelines. The directions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is different. If there were published 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 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed published extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my various blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we’ve detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud 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 customer reviews as though they were real reviews from genuine customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, 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 ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add brand-new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce customers in San Luis Obispo have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. Nobody 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 Luis Obispo:
- 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 Luis Obispo 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 Luis Obispo 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 large charge and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are far more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely require to utilize 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 overpaying by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in San Luis Obispo
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.