Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Santa Paula | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Santa Paula?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Santa Paula. But do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a doctor. However, smart customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry expert. That professional will be skilled, experienced and licensed and monitored by a regional watchdog agency. In other words, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine issue. No one wishes to spend too much on any product or service. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have drastically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, local attorneys.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments because they don’t want you to save money. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not reputable when they know profession developments that significantly lower your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to avoid the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Santa Paula. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Santa Paula
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Santa Paula is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, but you likewise do not wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will mess 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 taking care of their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, auto fixed or mole removed, you want to get the very best task done at the most reasonable fee. That reasonable price is most likely not the smallest expense, but it is probably not far away from the lowest expense. To put it simply, in everything we consumers buy we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Santa Paula.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Paula
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a local Santa Paula divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is a very high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already selected a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner 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 Paula?
- 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 Paula:
| 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 Paula:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public forms. Even if you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to complete them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has
made one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most difficult divorce treatment in the whole nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 get totally free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen forms 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 guidelines. The directions that the state of California offers are guidelines only. They will not assist you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. 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.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair than it would have cost for you to employ {a city} online divorce lawyer in the first place (see below). Going it alone in California divorce these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I have indeed written extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my many posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams 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 outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to build up fake customer reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact 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. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews 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 amongst the most dishonest online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few 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 complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add in new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Santa Paula have been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. Nobody will protect 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 Paula:
- 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 Paula 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 Paula 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 conventional option. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every single thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a huge amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Santa Paula
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.