Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Clara | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Clara?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Clara. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a physician. Nevertheless, smart customers usually do not get any of those jobs done other than by a local market expert. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and regulated by a LOCAL monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is liable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, regional attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those industry developments since they do not want you to save money. They desire you to provide unnecessary money to them! That’s not legitimate when they are aware of profession trends that dramatically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Santa Clara. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Clara
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Santa Clara is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you also do not wish to give a small amount of money to someone who will mess 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 mistakes for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the best job done at the most affordable cost. That reasonable price is most likely not the lowest expense, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest fee. Simply put, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Clara.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Clara
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional Santa Clara divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complicated issues, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed already employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has already employed a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 Clara?
- 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 Clara:
| 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 Clara:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms 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. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
created one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce procedure in the whole nation. Only Vermont is harder.
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 could get free of cost forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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 into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 have indeed written substantially before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my various posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we have actually recognized 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, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to build up phony customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials 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 sister site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (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 among the most dishonest online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A several operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will be interested 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 make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people just add brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Santa Clara have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. Nobody will safeguard 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 Santa Clara:
- 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 Clara 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 Clara 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 alternative. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large cost and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, you are paying too much 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 Clara
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.