Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Cruz | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Cruz?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Cruz. However do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car repaired by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, clever consumers normally don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local industry professional. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL watchdog agency. To put it simply, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more ethical, regional attorneys.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments due to the fact that they don’t desire you to conserve money. They want you to offer unnecessary money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand industry developments that significantly decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust lawyers?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Santa Cruz. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Cruz
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Santa Cruz is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you also do not wish to give a small amount of money to someone 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 screw up your case and you end up taking care of their mistakes for many years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile repaired or mole removed, you wish to get the best task done at the most affordable fee. That affordable fee is probably not the smallest price, however it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Cruz.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Cruz
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a local Santa Cruz divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed currently chosen a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted 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 Cruz?
- 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 Cruz:
| 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 Cruz:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. But 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 indicate you’ll know how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
designed one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the whole country. Only Vermont is more challenging.
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 cost-free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on maybe a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents 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 furnishes 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 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 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 contract {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 scams in California. That is simply among my many posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified writer employed one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of particular scams we’ve discovered in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed 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 designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate phony customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site 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 same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with 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. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several 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 currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add brand-new scams and new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Santa Cruz have been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will protect you. Keep 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 Cruz:
- 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 Cruz 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 Cruz 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 option. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Cruz
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.