Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Monica | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Monica?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Monica. However do you truly wish 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 someone who is not a physician. However, wise customers usually do not get any of those tasks done except by a local industry specialist. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that expert is liable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being used by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments due to the fact that they don’t want you to conserve money. They want you to provide extra money to them! That’s not reputable when they know profession developments that drastically lower your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not 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 Monica. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Monica
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Santa Monica 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, but you also do not wish to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 screw up your case and you end up shelling out for their errors for many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Most consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole got rid of, you want to get the best job done at the most reasonable cost. That reasonable expense is probably not the smallest cost, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest fee. To put it simply, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Monica.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Monica
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a regional Santa Monica divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some intricate issues, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has already selected a lawyer, you are highly recommended to get your own lawyer despite how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Santa Monica?
- 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 Monica:
| 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 Monica:
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 needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public papers. Just because you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most perplexing divorce processeses in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the entire country. 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 might get free of cost papers from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page legal documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your specific 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 revealed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be numerous hours long.
Do not fall under 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 extensively before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my numerous posts on online divorce fraud. Also see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we have actually recognized in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was utilizing a self-owned website to accumulate phony client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine clients. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never 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 consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer 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 among the most dishonest online services that exist in ANY sector. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest 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 ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add in new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Santa Monica have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will secure 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 Monica:
- 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 Monica 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 Monica 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 traditional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this option, you are overpaying by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Monica
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.