Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Westminster | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Westminster?
Yes, you can definitely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Westminster. But do you actually want to?
You can get a haircut without a barber or beauty salon. You can have your automobile repaired by somebody who is not a professional mechanic. You can have a growth on your skin eliminated by someone who is not a physician. However, clever consumers usually do not get any of those jobs done except by a local industry expert. That expert will be knowledgeable, experienced and licensed and licensed by a LOCAL monitor agency. Simply put, that professional is responsible locally.
OK, I hear you discuss the traditional outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in an easy uncontested divorce. Cost is crucial. It is a genuine issue. No one wants to overspend on any service or product. However, are you up to date on recent legal industry developments that have dramatically cut the cost of uncontested divorce by a local lawyer?
Those new patterns are only being utilized by a relatively small number of more competitive, and possibly more trustworthy, local lawyers.
The majority of attorneys will not tell you about those industry trends due to the fact that they don’t desire you to conserve money. They desire you to give additional money to them! That’s not trustworthy when they know industry developments that drastically minimize your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll inform 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 Westminster. Read on.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Westminster
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Westminster is NOT only what you pay for the service. It’s ALL expenses, now and in the future!
So you don’t wish to pay too much, however you also don’t want 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 mess up your case and you end up taking care of their mistakes for several years, that’s not a cheap divorce. That would be an extremely pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not wise.
Most consumers understand that when you get a divorce, haircut, car fixed or mole eliminated, you wish to get the very best task done at the most reasonable price. That sensible cost is most likely not the lowest price, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest fee. In other words, in everything we individuals purchase we want there to be a balance among quality and expense.
The key to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that concept (a sliding scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Westminster.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Westminster
Remember that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still hire a local Westminster divorce lawyer on complete traditional representation if your case has some intricate concerns, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your spouse has indeed currently hired a lawyer.
If your partner has currently hired a lawyer, you are highly advised to get your own lawyer regardless of how basic and easy you consider your case to be. Don’t listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer telling you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, presuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not substantial, there’s no domestic violence and your partner has not contracted a lawyer, let’s look quickly at each of the 4 readily available choices to get an uncontested divorce with reference to both expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Westminster?
- 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 Westminster:
| 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 Westminster:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce papers online from your local Superior Court site. But 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 indicate you’ll understand how to complete them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
developed one of the most complicated divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey research study, California has the 2nd most complicated divorce process in the whole nation. Only 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 get totally free papers from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on possibly a dozen legal documents 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 very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce directions. The instructions 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 numerous hours long.
Do not fall under the DIY trap. You will screw it up, and it will cost much more to fix 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 these days is a false economy.
Unlicensed Online Divorce Mill
I’ve written substantially in the past about online divorce scams in California. That is just one of my many blog posts on online divorce scams. Likewise see a good piece by my associate at NetDivorce. However don’t just take our word. Here is what happened when a qualified writer contracted one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Simply by way of an example, here is simply one of the lots of specific frauds 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 fraud complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That problem proved beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a phony testimonial scams. It was using a self-owned site to accumulate phony client reviews as though they were genuine reviews from real customers. It revealed that the phony testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search exposed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its related site were patrons of the phony testimonial site). That fake testimonial site was also hosted on the very same server as mydivorcepapers.com. These people are not clever.
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 indeed moved the phony review website to another server. Right now, California divorce consumers are being defrauded into hiring mydivorcepapers.com on the basis that they have thousands of genuine customer reviews 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 amongst the most treacherous online services that exist in ANY industry. Nobody polices them. They are primarily out of state. A several are 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 grievances will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of complaints and their BBB rankings are often “F.” They can cheat a lot faster than you can make a complaint.
Online divorce fraud pays and it pays BIG. These guys simply add new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Westminster have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and no one cares. No one will safeguard 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 Westminster:
- 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 Westminster 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 Westminster 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 conventional option. This is full traditional legal representation by a regional lawyer. You pay him or her a huge charge and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up until the early ’80s, this was the only option. Then, regional 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 traffic to the fraudulent online divorce mills, who have far better websites and are much more competitive than attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you definitely need to utilize full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you don’t have any of the noted factors to use this alternative, you are paying too much by a huge quantity. However, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Westminster
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.