Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Maria | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Maria?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Maria. However do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car repaired by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, wise customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry expert. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional watchdog agency. To put it simply, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to spend beyond your means on any product or service. However, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have significantly cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession trends that drastically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust attorneys?
I’ll advise 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 Maria. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Maria
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Santa Maria is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, however 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they mess up your case and you end up shelling out for their errors for many years, that’s not a low-cost 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, auto repaired or mole removed, you want to get the very best job done at the most sensible expense. That affordable cost is most likely not the lowest fee, however it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. In other words, in everything we consumers buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Maria.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Maria
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local Santa Maria divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Santa Maria?
- 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 Maria:
| 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 Maria:
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 due to the fact that they are public papers. Just because you can download them does not indicate you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of charge divorce.
The State of California has indeed
made one of the most perplexing divorce treatments in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce process in the entire nation. Just Vermont is more difficult.
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 totally free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different 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 guidelines 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 showed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be many hours long.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written substantially in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my numerous blog posts on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific scams we’ve detected in the online divorce mill industry.
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 largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate phony client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from genuine clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, look at 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 swindling online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few 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 grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Santa Maria have indeed been getting screwed for decades, 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 Santa Maria:
- 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 Maria 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 Maria 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 already covered this alternative above. This is the conventional alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you do not have any of the listed factors to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a substantial 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 Maria
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.