Uncontested Divorce Lawyer Woodland | 1-800-DIVORCE
Can You Get an Uncontested Divorce Without a Lawyer in Woodland?
Yes, you can absolutely get an uncontested divorce without a lawyer in Woodland. However do you really want to?
You can get a haircut 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 eliminated by someone who is not a medical professional. However, clever consumers usually do not get any of those tasks done other than by a regional industry professional. That specialist will be knowledgeable, experienced and certified and monitored by a regional watchdog organization. In other words, that professional is liable locally.
OK, I hear you mention the old-fashioned outrageous expense of a lawyer – even in a basic uncontested divorce. Expense is essential. It is a genuine concern. No one wishes to spend beyond your means on any service or product. Nevertheless, are you up to date on current legal profession developments that have considerably cut the expense of uncontested divorce by a regional lawyer?
Those brand-new trends are only being used by a fairly small number of more competitive, and perhaps more trustworthy, local attorneys.
Many attorneys will not tell you about those profession developments since they don’t want you to conserve cash. They want you to provide additional money to them! That’s not reputable when they understand profession developments that drastically decrease your expense for their services. Is it any wonder that some individuals don’t trust attorneys?
I’ll advise you about those trends, how to avoid the deceitful attorneys and how to make the trends work for you to get an uncontested divorce WITH a lawyer in Woodland. Keep reading.
Uncontested Divorce Cost in Woodland
The expense of an uncontested divorce in Woodland is NOT just what you pay for the service. It’s ALL costs, now and in the future!
So you don’t want to overpay, but you also 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 ruin your case and you wind up shelling out for their errors for years, that’s not a low-cost divorce. That would be a very pricey divorce that you paid a small amount of money to get. Not clever.
The majority of consumers realize that when you get a divorce, hairstyle, car fixed or mole removed, you want to get the very best job done at the most sensible fee. That affordable expense is probably not the smallest cost, however it is most likely not far away from the smallest expense. In other words, in everything we individuals buy we desire there to be a balance between quality and expense.
The secret to getting the best of both worlds is how to apply that principle (a moving scale of both quality and cost) to getting an uncontested divorce in Woodland.
Uncontested Divorce Process in Woodland
Keep in mind that even if you have an uncontested case, you must still employ a local Woodland divorce lawyer on full conventional representation if your case has some complex issues, if there is an extremely high dollar value to the marital estate, if there is domestic violence or if your partner has currently employed a lawyer.
If your spouse has indeed already hired a lawyer, you are strongly encouraged to get your own lawyer regardless of how uncomplicated and easy you consider your case to be. Do not listen to your partner or your partner’s lawyer advising you that a single lawyer can care for both of you.
So, assuming that you have an uncontested case that contains no complicated issues, your marital estate is not big, there’s no domestic violence and your spouse 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 expense and quality.
What Are Your Options To Get an Uncontested Divorce in Woodland?
- 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 Woodland:
| 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 Woodland:
Do It Yourself
You can download blank divorce forms online from your local Superior Court website. However what are you going to do with them then? The state has to make them downloadable because they are public forms. Even if you can download them does not suggest you’ll know how to finalize them and get a free divorce.
The State of California has
created one of the most complex divorce processeses in the nation. According to a recent Insider Monkey study, California has the second most complicated divorce process in the entire country. 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 get totally free forms from the court, rev up your old typewriter and get an uncontested California divorce, even with minor children, on perhaps a dozen legal documents totaling 20-25 sheets of paper. Now, it would take about 35-40 different state and county multi-page documents on perhaps 120-150 sheets of paper to get the very same divorce.
And there are no magic California divorce instructions. The instructions that the state of California furnishes are guidelines only. They will not help you to get a divorce in your specific case. Every divorce case is unique. If there were published directions 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 numerous hours long.
Don’t fall under 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 employ {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 have indeed published widely before about online divorce scams in California. That is simply among my many articles on online divorce scams. Likewise see a great piece by my colleague at NetDivorce. However do not just take our word. Here is what took place when a qualified writer hired one of the most significant online divorce mills.
Just by way of an example, here is simply one of the dozens of specific frauds we’ve 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 scams complaint against mydivorcepapers.com, most likely the biggest divorce mill in California. It was assigned Complaint ID I1501301241468482. That complaint showed beyond any reasonable doubt that mydivorcepapers was running a fake testimonial scams. It was utilizing a self-owned site to accumulate fake client reviews as though they were real reviews from real clients. It showed that the fake testimonial site had just a very few pages (a Google search revealed that just mydivorcepapers.com and its sister site were clients of the fake testimonial website). That fake 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 exact same testimonial deception over 8 years later (at the most recent update of this article), though they have moved the fake testimonial website 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 client 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 fraudulent online services that exist in ANY business. Nobody polices them. They are mostly out of state. A few are in India or Ukraine. Neither your local District Attorney nor the California Attorney General, Consumer Fraud Division, will be interested in pursuing them. Your Better Business Bureau or Yelp grievances will not even touch them. They already have dozens or hundreds of grievances 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 brand-new scams and new websites all the time. Divorce consumers in Woodland have indeed been getting screwed for decades, and nobody cares. No one will safeguard you. Keep 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 Woodland:
- 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 Woodland 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 Woodland 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 traditional legal representation by a local lawyer. You pay him or her a huge cost and s/he does every little thing in the case for you. It’s convenient but way over-priced.
Up till the early ’80s, this was the only choice. Then, regional paralegals began to eat into the lawyers’ previous divorce monopoly. From around 1999, regional divorce attorneys 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 attorneys.
There are times (noted above) when you absolutely require to use full legal representation – even in an uncontested divorce. But if you do not have any of the noted reasons to use this alternative, you are overpaying by a substantial quantity. Nevertheless, the quality of work will likely be great.
Why Not Get the Best of Both Worlds in the Uncontested Divorce Process in Woodland
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.