Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Thousand Oaks | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Thousand Oaks?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Thousand Oaks. But do you actually wish to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your car fixed by someone who is not a qualified mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by someone who is not a medical professional. Nevertheless, smart customers normally do not get any of those jobs done except by a local industry professional. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and controlled by a regional watchdog agency. 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 basic uncontested divorce. Expense is very important. It is a genuine concern. Nobody wants to overspend on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal industry developments that have significantly cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being utilized by a fairly small number of more competitive, and possibly more ethical, local attorneys.
Most attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends due to the fact that they do not desire you to save money. They desire you to give unnecessary money to them! That’s not on the level when they understand profession trends that dramatically lower 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 stay clear of the unethical lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Thousand Oaks. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Thousand Oaks
The cost of an uncontested divorce in Thousand Oaks is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to overpay, but you also 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, unregulated online divorce mill that’s out-of-state or in India or Ukraine and they ruin your case and you wind up taking care of their errors for several years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
A lot of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, haircut, vehicle fixed or mole eliminated, you want to get the very best task done at the most affordable fee. That sensible price is probably not the smallest cost, however it is probably not far away from the smallest fee. To put it simply, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and cost.
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 Thousand Oaks.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Thousand Oaks
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a local Thousand Oaks divorce lawyer on full traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar worth to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are strongly advised to get your own lawyer no matter how straightforward and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can take care of both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no intricate problems, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Thousand Oaks?
- 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 Thousand Oaks:
| 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 Thousand Oaks:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court site. But what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Just because you can download them does not mean you’ll know how to complete them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has actually
established one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the second most difficult divorce process in the entire country. Only Vermont is more difficult.
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 could pick up free of charge documents from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen forms totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 separate state and county multi-page forms on maybe 120-150 sheets of paper to get the exact 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 different. If there were written guidelines 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 under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to fix 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’ve written substantially before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my numerous articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. But do not just take our word. Here is what occurred when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific frauds we have actually discovered in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted with the FBI’s online fraud division an absolute slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the largest divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial fraud. It was using a self-owned site to accumulate phony client testimonials as though they were real reviews from genuine customers. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were customers of the fake testimonial site). That fake testimonial website was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These guys are not smart.
I never heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the very same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the phony review website to another server. Today, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into employing mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 among the most deceptive online services that exist in ANY business. No one polices them. They are primarily out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints won’t even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances and their BBB ratings are usually “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add brand-new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Thousand Oaks have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. No one will protect you. Stay 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 Thousand Oaks:
- 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 Thousand Oaks 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 Thousand Oaks 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 conventional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a very large charge and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce lawyers have actually lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have better sites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. However if you don’t have any of the listed reasons to use this option, you are paying too much by a substantial quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Thousand Oaks
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.