Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Stockton | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Stockton?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Stockton. But do you really wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your vehicle fixed by somebody who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a physician. Nevertheless, wise consumers usually don’t get any of those tasks done except by a local industry specialist. That professional will be competent, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional monitor organization. To put it simply, that expert is liable locally.
OK, I hear you point out the traditional outrageous cost of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new patterns are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and maybe more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments because they don’t desire you to save money. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they understand profession developments that significantly lower your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll share with you about those trends, how to stay away from the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Stockton. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Stockton
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Stockton is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you likewise do not want 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 screw up your case and you end up taking care of their errors for years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a really pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
The majority of divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, car repaired or mole removed, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable price. That affordable expense is most likely not the smallest fee, but it is most likely not far away from the lowest cost. In other words, in everything we individuals buy we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
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 Stockton.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Stockton
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still employ a local Stockton divorce lawyer on complete conventional 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 already hired a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already selected a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complicated problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse 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 Stockton?
- 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 Stockton:
| 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 Stockton:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your local Superior Court website. 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 doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a cost-free divorce.
The State of California has actually
designed one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce procedure in the entire country. Only Vermont is more challenging.
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 forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor 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 perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The guidelines 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 different. If there were published 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.
Don’t fall into the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far 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 published extensively before about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my various articles on online divorce scams. Also see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But don’t simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of particular frauds we’ve recognized 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, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned website to accumulate fake client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search revealed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the fake testimonial website). That phony testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the same testimonial fraud 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 genuine client testimonials when they do not.
Likewise, 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 amongst the most deceitful online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mostly 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 won’t even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add new frauds and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Stockton have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will secure 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 Stockton:
- 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 Stockton 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 Stockton 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 option above. This is the conventional alternative. 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 till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ prior 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 better sites and are much more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you definitely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed factors to utilize this option, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Stockton
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.