Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Sunnyvale | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Sunnyvale?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Sunnyvale. But do you actually want to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin gotten rid of by someone who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever consumers typically don’t get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry specialist. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL watchdog agency. In other words, that expert is liable locally.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is important. It is a legitimate concern. No one wishes to overspend on any product or service. However, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have drastically 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 perhaps more ethical, local lawyers.
Many lawyers will not tell you about those industry trends because they don’t desire you to conserve cash. They want you to offer extra money to them! That’s not honest when they are aware of profession developments that drastically decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some people don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll tell you about those trends, how to keep away from the dishonest lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Sunnyvale. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Sunnyvale
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Sunnyvale is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you likewise do not wish to pay 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 ruin your case and you wind up financing their mistakes 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 smart.
Most divorce consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle repaired or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best job done at the most affordable expense. That affordable expense is probably not the lowest price, however it is probably not far away from the lowest expense. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and cost.
The secret to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Sunnyvale.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Sunnyvale
Bear in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you need to still select a regional Sunnyvale divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complicated concerns, if there is a really high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has indeed not hired a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Sunnyvale?
- 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 Sunnyvale:
| 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 Sunnyvale:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce documents online from your regional Superior Court website. But 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 doesn’t suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
created one of the most challenging divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most challenging divorce process in the entire nation. Just Vermont is more difficult.
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 could get free of cost documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on perhaps a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is distinct. 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.
Don’t fall under 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 have indeed published widely in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not simply take our word. Here is what took place when a professional writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of particular frauds we have actually pinpointed in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate phony client reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the phony testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the fake testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not wise.
I never ever heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the 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 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 amongst the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A several are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add brand-new frauds and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Sunnyvale have been getting screwed for years, and no one cares. Nobody 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 Sunnyvale:
- 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 Sunnyvale 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 Sunnyvale 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 alternative above. This is the traditional choice. This is complete traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce attorneys have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Sunnyvale
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.