Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Simi Valley | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Simi Valley?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Simi Valley. However do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a medical professional. However, clever customers typically don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local industry specialist. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL monitor organization. Simply put, that specialist is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wishes to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new trends are just being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more honest, local lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends since they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand industry developments that considerably minimize your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Simi Valley. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Simi Valley
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Simi Valley is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, however you also do not want to give a small amount of money to somebody who will screw 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 ruin your case and you end up shelling out for their mistakes for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not smart.
A lot of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best task done at the most affordable cost. That reasonable fee is most likely not the lowest cost, but it is probably not far away from the smallest cost. Simply put, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Simi Valley.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Simi Valley
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still employ a regional Simi Valley divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has already employed 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 spouse or your spouse’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate concerns, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look rapidly 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 Simi Valley?
- 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 Simi Valley:
| 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 Simi Valley:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your regional Superior Court website. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable since they are public papers. Even if you can download them doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most complicated divorce procedure in the entire country. Just Vermont is harder.
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 documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on maybe a dozen documents amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. 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 many hours long.
Do not fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is simply one of my numerous posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply 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 simply one of the dozens of particular 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 fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned website to accumulate fake client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from genuine customers. It showed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were clients of the fake testimonial site). That phony 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 exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake review website to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine client reviews when they do not.
Also, 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. No one polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local 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 rankings are often “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 frauds and brand-new sites all the time. Divorce consumers in Simi Valley have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will protect you. Keep 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 Simi Valley:
- 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 Simi Valley 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 Simi Valley 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 alternative above. This is the traditional choice. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a substantial amount. However, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Simi Valley
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.