Uncontested Divorce Lawyer West Hollywood | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in West Hollywood?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in West Hollywood. However do you really wish to?
You can get a hairstyle without a barber or beauty
parlor. You can have your vehicle 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, smart consumers generally don’t get any of those jobs done except by a local market specialist. That specialist will be skilled, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that expert is liable in your area.
OK, I hear you discuss the conventional outrageous fee of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Cost is essential. It is a legitimate issue. No one wishes to spend too much on any service or product. However, are you up to date on current legal industry trends that have dramatically cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those new trends are just being used by a reasonably small number of more competitive, and perhaps more honest, regional lawyers.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t want you to conserve cash. They want you to offer extra money to them! That’s not honest when they understand profession trends that drastically minimize your cost for their services. Is it any surprise that some individuals don’t trust lawyers?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the unethical attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in West Hollywood. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in West Hollywood
The expense of an uncontested divorce in West Hollywood is NOT only what you spend for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to pay too much, but you also do not want to pay a small amount of money to someone 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 shelling out money for their errors for several years, that’s not an inexpensive divorce. That would be a very costly divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
A lot of consumers realize 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 cost. That sensible fee is probably not the lowest expense, but it is probably not far away from the smallest expense. In other words, in everything we consumers purchase we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
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 West Hollywood.
Uncontested Divorce Process in West Hollywood
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you ought to still select a local West Hollywood divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some complicated problems, if there is a really high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently contracted a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer despite how simple and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that one lawyer can look after both of you.
So, assuming 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 indeed not contracted a lawyer, let’s look rapidly at each of the 4 available options to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in West Hollywood?
- 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 Hollywood:
| 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 Hollywood:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court site. However what are you going to do with them then? The state needs to make them downloadable because they are public papers. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll understand how to complete them and get a totally free divorce.
The State of California has indeed
established one of the most perplexing divorce procedures in the country. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the 2nd most difficult divorce treatment in the whole nation. Just Vermont is more challenging.
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 pick up free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with small children, on possibly 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 instructions. The directions that the state of California offers 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 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 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 select {a city} online divorce lawyer in the first place (see below). Going it alone in California divorce these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve published extensively in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is simply one of my many posts on online divorce fraud. Also see an excellent piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. But do not simply take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer hired one of the biggest online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is just one of the lots of particular scams we have actually recognized in the online divorce mill market.
Back on January 30, 2015, I submitted 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 problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It showed that the phony testimonial site had merely a very few pages (a Google search exposed that only mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients 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 heard anything back from the FBI. Mydivorcepapers.com is STILL running the exact same testimonial rip-off over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have indeed moved the phony review website to another server. Right now, California divorce customers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of legitimate customer reviews 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 treacherous online services that exist in ANY business sector. Nobody polices them. They are mainly out of state. A few operate in India or Ukraine. Neither your county District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will have an interest in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp complaints will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are almost always “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys just add in brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce customers in West Hollywood have been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one 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 West Hollywood:
- 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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood 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 already covered this alternative above. This is the traditional option. This is full conventional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a very large fee and s/he does every little thing in the divorce case for you. It’s convenient however way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, local paralegals began to eat into the attorneys’ prior divorce monopoly. From around 1999, local divorce lawyers have lost almost all of their uncontested divorce business to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better sites and are a lot more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (listed above) when you absolutely require to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the listed factors to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a huge amount. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be excellent.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in West Hollywood
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.