Uncontested Divorce Lawyer San Rafael | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in San Rafael?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in San Rafael. However do you truly wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done except by a local industry professional. That specialist will be competent, experienced and licensed and controlled by a regional monitor agency. In other words, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate issue. Nobody wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, regional lawyers.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They want you to give additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they are aware of profession trends that considerably reduce your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in San Rafael. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in San Rafael
The expense of an uncontested divorce in San Rafael is NOT just what you spend 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 give a small amount of money to somebody who will screw 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 mess up your case and you end up paying for their errors for many 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 smart.
A lot of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best task done at the most affordable cost. That reasonable fee is most likely not the lowest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest fee. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in San Rafael.
Uncontested Divorce Process in San Rafael
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a local San Rafael divorce lawyer on complete traditional 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 partner has currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already employed a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse 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 complex problems, 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 options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in San Rafael?
- 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 Rafael:
| 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 Rafael:
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 needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce treatment in the entire nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 pick up free of charge documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on maybe a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is different. If there were published guidelines 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.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to fix than it would have cost for you to select {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 one of my numerous posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific frauds we have actually identified 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, 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 phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to collect fake customer testimonials as though they were real reviews from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer reviews when they do not.
Likewise, 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 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 grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances 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 simply add new frauds and new sites all the time. Divorce customers in San Rafael have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will secure you. Stay 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 Rafael:
- 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 Rafael 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 Rafael 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 alternative above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a big 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 Rafael
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.