Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Seaside | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Seaside?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Seaside. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle repaired by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by somebody who is not a medical professional. However, clever consumers generally don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a local industry expert. That expert will be skilled, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog agency. To put it simply, that specialist is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the old-fashioned outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wants to overspend on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry trends that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, regional lawyers.
The majority of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they do not desire you to save cash. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand industry trends that dramatically reduce your cost for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Seaside. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Seaside
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Seaside is NOT just 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 also do not wish to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 many years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of divorce consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, automobile fixed or mole removed, you wish to get the very best job done at the most affordable cost. That reasonable fee is most likely not the smallest fee, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Seaside.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Seaside
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still employ a local Seaside divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is a very high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single 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 not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 readily available alternatives to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Seaside?
- 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 Seaside:
| 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 Seaside:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
developed one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce procedure in the whole country. Just Vermont is more difficult.
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 pick up free of cost documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 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 very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The directions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were published directions 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 DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to fix 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 widely in the past about online divorce fraud in California. That is just among my numerous articles on online divorce scams. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a professional author hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to build up phony client testimonials as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people 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 moved the fake review site to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer 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 among the most swindling online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local 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 people simply add in brand-new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Seaside have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. Nobody 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 Seaside:
- 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 Seaside 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 Seaside 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 previously covered this alternative above. This is the conventional choice. This is complete conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
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 noted factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a big amount. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Seaside
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.