Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Saratoga | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Saratoga?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Saratoga. However do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a physician. However, wise customers usually don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local market professional. That expert will be proficient, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. Simply put, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wants to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments due to the fact that they don’t want you to conserve cash. They desire you to provide extra money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they are aware of industry trends that dramatically minimize your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to stay away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Saratoga. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Saratoga
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Saratoga is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you likewise do not want to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 screw up your case and you wind up taking care of their mistakes for years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
The majority of consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle fixed or mole removed, you wish to get the very best job done at the most affordable cost. That affordable fee is most likely not the lowest price, but it is probably not far away from the lowest fee. In other words, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Saratoga.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Saratoga
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still select a regional Saratoga divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has already chosen a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of 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 look after both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Saratoga?
- 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 Saratoga:
| 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 Saratoga:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Just because you can download them does not mean you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the second most challenging divorce procedure in the entire nation. Just Vermont is tougher.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be much easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could get cost-free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen legal documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page legal documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The directions that the state of California provides are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is different. If there were published directions 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 many hours long.
Don’t fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to repair 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my many blog posts on online divorce fraud. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional writer contracted one of the most significant 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 market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted 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 complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to build up fake customer testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were customers of the phony testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was likewise 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 same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake review site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into working with 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 amongst the most deceptive online services that exist in ANY industry. No one polices them. They are primarily 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 grievances and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add brand-new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Saratoga have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. Nobody will protect you. Keep 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 Saratoga:
- 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 Saratoga 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 Saratoga 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 option above. This is the traditional alternative. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large charge 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 alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted reasons to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a big quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Saratoga
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.