Uncontested Divorce Lawyer South Whittier | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in South Whittier?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in South Whittier. But do you truly want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile fixed by someone who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever customers usually don’t get any of those jobs done other than by a regional industry specialist. That professional will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and regulated by a regional monitor agency. In other words, that specialist is accountable locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are just being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends since they do not desire you to save money. They desire you to give additional money to them! That’s not legitimate when they understand industry trends that drastically reduce your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some people do not trust lawyers?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to keep away from the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in South Whittier. Continue reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in South Whittier
The expense of an uncontested divorce in South Whittier is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, 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, unregulated 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 errors 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 divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best job done at the most reasonable expense. That affordable expense is most likely not the smallest fee, however it is probably not far away from the lowest cost. Simply put, in everything we consumers buy 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 sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in South Whittier.
Uncontested Divorce Process in South Whittier
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still select a regional South Whittier divorce lawyer on complete conventional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has already employed a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed 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 partner or your spouse’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not huge, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly 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 South Whittier?
- 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 Whittier:
| 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 Whittier:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable due to the fact that they are public documents. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
designed one of the most perplexing 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 harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for many people pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you might get free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly 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 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 help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is distinct. If there were written guidelines 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.
Don’t fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to repair 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 nowadays is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve written extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my various posts on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author contracted one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific frauds we’ve identified in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to collect phony client reviews as though they were real testimonials from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were patrons of the fake testimonial website). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (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 client testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, check out 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody 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 Division, will be interested 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 scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in South Whittier have been getting screwed for many years, and nobody cares. No one will protect 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 Whittier:
- 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 Whittier 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 Whittier 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 option. This is full traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better websites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted factors to utilize this option, 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 South Whittier
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.