Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Visalia | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Visalia?
Yes, you can certainly get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Visalia. However do you really want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile 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 medical professional. Nevertheless, clever customers generally do not get any of those jobs done except by a regional industry expert. That specialist will be proficient, experienced and certified and licensed by a LOCAL watchdog organization. To put it simply, that expert is accountable in your area.
OK, I hear you point out the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a simple uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine issue. Nobody wants to overspend on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have considerably cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those brand-new patterns are just being utilized by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and possibly more honest, local attorneys.
Most lawyers will not tell you about those profession developments since they do not desire you to save cash. They desire you to offer extra money to them! That’s not fair when they understand profession developments that considerably decrease your expense for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to stay clear of the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Visalia. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Visalia
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Visalia is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you do not want to overpay, however you likewise do not wish to pay a small amount of money to somebody who will screw 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 screw up your case and you end up taking care of their errors for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
Most divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car fixed or mole removed, you wish to get the best task done at the most reasonable cost. That sensible expense is probably not the lowest cost, but it is probably not far away from the smallest expense. Simply put, in everything we consumers purchase we want there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that idea (a moving scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in Visalia.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Visalia
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you should still hire a local Visalia divorce lawyer on complete 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 spouse has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your partner has indeed already contracted a lawyer, you are strongly recommended to get your own lawyer regardless of how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your spouse or your spouse’s lawyer informing you that one lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case which contains no complex problems, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both cost and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Visalia?
- 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 Visalia:
| 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 Visalia:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms 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 forms. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has
established one of the most challenging divorce processeses in the nation. According to a current Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce process in the whole nation. Only Vermont is harder.
Doing your own divorce in California used to be a lot easier and was possible for lots of folks pre-Internet. In the ’80s and early ’90s, you could pick up totally free forms from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on maybe a dozen documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page legal documents on possibly 120-150 sheets of paper to get the same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce guidelines. The guidelines that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your particular case. Every divorce case is unique. 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.
Do not fall under the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost far more to repair than it would have cost for you to hire {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 before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many blog posts on online divorce scams. Also see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer employed one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is just one of the dozens of specific scams we have actually discovered 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 most significant divorce mill in California. It was designated Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned website to build up fake customer reviews as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It showed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister website were patrons of the phony testimonial website). That phony testimonial website 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 deception over 8 years later on (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the fake 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 legitimate customer testimonials when they do not.
Also, 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 dishonest online services that exist in ANY business sector. No one polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Department, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They currently have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB scores are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people simply add in brand-new scams and brand-new websites all the time. Divorce customers in Visalia have indeed been getting screwed for years, and nobody cares. Nobody will safeguard 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 Visalia:
- 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 Visalia 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 Visalia 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 choice. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a large fee and s/he does everything in the case for you. It’s convenient but substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, regional paralegals started to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce traffic to the deceitful online divorce mills, who have much better websites and are a lot more competitive than lawyers.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the listed factors to utilize this option, you are paying too much by a big quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Visalia
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.