Uncontested Divorce Lawyer South Gate | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in South Gate?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in South Gate. But do you truly want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed 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 doctor. Nevertheless, smart consumers typically do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry expert. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and controlled by a LOCAL watchdog organization. In other words, that specialist is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a genuine concern. No one wants to overspend on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more ethical, regional lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to give extra money to them! That’s not on the level when they are aware of industry trends that considerably minimize your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to keep away from the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in South Gate. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in South Gate
The expense of an uncontested divorce in South Gate is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not wish to overpay, however you also don’t want to give a small amount of money to someone 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 taking care of their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be an extremely expensive 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, hairstyle, automobile fixed or mole got rid of, you wish to get the very best job done at the most reasonable cost. That sensible price 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 consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in South Gate.
Uncontested Divorce Process in South Gate
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still hire a regional South Gate divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is a really 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 indeed currently chosen a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how basic 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 take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no intricate problems, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted 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 South Gate?
- 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 South Gate:
| 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 South Gate:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Just because 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 actually
designed one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the country. According to a current Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce process in the entire country. Only 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 might pick up totally free documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. 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 written instructions 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to repair than it would have cost for you to contract {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 have indeed written widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many blog posts on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a professional writer employed one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular frauds we’ve pinpointed 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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to collect fake client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial site was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not clever.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial scam over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review site to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into working with mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate 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 fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business sector. 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 Department, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores 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 new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in South Gate 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 South Gate:
- 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 South Gate 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 South Gate 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 choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are far more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a big amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in South Gate
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.