Uncontested Divorce Lawyer South San Francisco | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in South San Francisco?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in South San Francisco. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a medical professional. However, clever customers normally do not get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry specialist. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and certified and regulated by a LOCAL monitor organization. Simply put, that professional is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wants to spend too much on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have drastically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, regional lawyers.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those profession trends since they don’t desire you to save cash. They want you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not honest when they know profession trends that dramatically decrease your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll explain to you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in South San Francisco. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in South San Francisco
The cost of an uncontested divorce in South San Francisco is NOT just what you spend for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you do not want to pay too much, however you also don’t 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 mess up your case and you wind up financing their mistakes for several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Many divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you wish to get the best task done at the most affordable expense. That sensible fee is most likely not the lowest price, but it is most likely not far away from the smallest price. In other words, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in South San Francisco.
Uncontested Divorce Process in South San Francisco
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a local South San Francisco divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a really 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 currently hired a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer no matter how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your spouse or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not employed a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily 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 San Francisco?
- 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 San Francisco:
| 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 San Francisco:
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 has to make them downloadable since they are public forms. Just because you can download them does not suggest you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most complex divorce treatments in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most challenging divorce procedure in the entire country. Just 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 might get free of charge 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 documents on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines 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 showed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be numerous hours long.
Do not fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to fix 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’ve written extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just among my numerous blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular frauds we’ve detected in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to build up phony customer reviews as though they were real testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its related website were clients of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial website was likewise hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony testimonial site to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate client reviews when they do not.
Likewise, 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 deceitful online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These guys merely add new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in South San Francisco have indeed been getting screwed for many years, and no one cares. No one will secure 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 South San Francisco:
- 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 San Francisco 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 San Francisco 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 option. This is full conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a large cost and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are far 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 do not have any of the listed factors to use this option, you are overpaying by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be very good.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in South San Francisco
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.