Uncontested Divorce Lawyer West Covina | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in West Covina?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in West Covina. But do you truly wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin removed by somebody who is not a doctor. Nevertheless, clever consumers generally do not get any of those tasks done except by a regional market expert. That professional will be proficient, experienced and licensed and monitored by a LOCAL monitor organization. Simply put, that expert is responsible in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is very important. It is a legitimate concern. Nobody wishes to spend beyond your means on any product or service. Nevertheless, are you up to date on recent legal profession developments that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and maybe more trustworthy, local lawyers.
A lot of lawyers will not tell you about those industry developments since they don’t want you to conserve cash. They want you to give extra money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they are aware of industry trends that considerably decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals do not trust attorneys?
I’ll inform you about those trends, how to stay clear of the deceitful lawyers and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in West Covina. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in West Covina
The expense of an uncontested divorce in West Covina is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, but you also don’t wish to give a small amount of money to somebody 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 mess up your case and you end up taking care of their errors for several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very expensive divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of divorce consumers recognize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, auto repaired or mole removed, you want to get the best task done at the most reasonable price. That sensible price is most likely not the lowest price, however it is probably not far away from the lowest expense. To put it simply, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance among quality and cost.
The key to getting the very best of both worlds is how to use that idea (a sliding scale of both quality and expense) to getting an uncontested divorce in West Covina.
Uncontested Divorce Process in West Covina
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a regional West Covina divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complex concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer.
If your partner has already selected a lawyer, you are highly encouraged to get your own lawyer no matter how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not 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 that contains no complicated concerns, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse has indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in West Covina?
- 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 West Covina:
| 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 West Covina:
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 since they are public documents. Just because you can download them doesn’t imply you’ll understand how to finalize them and get a free of cost divorce.
The State of California has indeed
developed one of the most complicated divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most challenging divorce process in the whole nation. Only Vermont is tougher.
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 get free of cost documents from the court, dust off your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly a dozen forms amounting to 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page forms 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 assist you to get a divorce in your specific 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 showed you how to prepare and process your uncontested divorce, it would be many hours long.
Don’t fall into the do it yourself trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost a lot more to fix than it would have cost for you to contract {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 widely before about online divorce fraud in California. That is just one of my various articles on online divorce fraud. Likewise see a good piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified author hired one of the largest online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific scams we have actually identified in the online divorce mill industry.
Back on January 30, 2015, I filed with the FBI’s online fraud division an outright slam-dunk scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, probably the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That grievance showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake client testimonials as though they were genuine testimonials from real clients. It revealed that the fake testimonial website had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the phony testimonial site). That phony testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not smart.
I never ever 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 indeed moved the phony testimonial website to another server. Today, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer reviews when they do not.
Also, 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 deceitful 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 county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, 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 complaints and their BBB scores are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can complain.
Online divorce deception pays and it pays BIG. These people merely add new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in West Covina have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. Nobody 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 West Covina:
- 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 West Covina 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 West Covina 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 traditional 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 divorce case for you. It’s convenient however substantially over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only alternative. Then, local paralegals started to eat into the attorneys’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the deceptive online divorce mills, who have better sites and are far 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 noted factors to utilize this alternative, you are overpaying by a big amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in West Covina
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.