Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Ana | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Ana?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Ana. However do you really want to?
You can get a hairstyle 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 gotten rid of by somebody who is not a medical professional. However, wise customers generally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional market professional. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and licensed by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is crucial. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wants to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more trustworthy, regional attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments because they do not want you to conserve money. They desire you to offer additional money to them! That’s not on the level when they know profession trends that drastically decrease 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 unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Santa Ana. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Ana
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Santa Ana is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, but you likewise do not 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 ruin your case and you end up paying for their errors for several years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you want to get the best task done at the most sensible price. That sensible expense is most likely not the lowest price, however it is probably not far away from the smallest expense. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Ana.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Ana
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a regional Santa Ana divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single 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 huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired 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 Santa Ana?
- 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 Santa Ana:
| 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 Santa Ana:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional 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 does not imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most complex divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce procedure in the entire country. Just Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe 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 possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were written 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.
Don’t fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix 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 widely in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my many blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up fake client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was likewise 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 fraud over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review site to another server. Today, 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, check out 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. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores 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 brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Santa Ana have indeed been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. Nobody 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 Santa Ana:
- 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 Santa Ana 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 Santa Ana 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 traditional alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does everything in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Ana
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.