Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Barbara | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Barbara?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Barbara. But do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle fixed by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, smart customers normally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry professional. That professional will be competent, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL watchdog organization. To put it simply, that specialist is liable locally.
OK, I hear you mention the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are only being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, regional lawyers.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession trends because they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They desire you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession developments that dramatically decrease your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll inform 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 Santa Barbara. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Barbara
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Santa Barbara is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, however you likewise 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 ruin your case and you wind up taking care of their mistakes for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best task done at the most sensible fee. That sensible fee is probably not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Barbara.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Barbara
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still select a local Santa Barbara divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Santa Barbara?
- 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 Barbara:
| 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 Barbara:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your regional Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the whole country. Just Vermont is more challenging.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many individuals pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could pick up free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions 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 distinct. If there were written instructions 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 numerous hours long.
Don’t fall into 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 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 before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my various articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually identified 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, most likely the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to accumulate phony customer reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial website 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 same testimonial deception 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 employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several operate 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 complaints won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people just add new frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Santa Barbara have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. Nobody will protect you. Stay 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 Barbara:
- 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 Barbara 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 Barbara 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 have indeed previously covered this option above. This is the traditional alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
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 utilize this option, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Barbara
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.