Uncontested Divorce Santa Monica | 1-800-DIVORCE
Uncontested Divorce in Santa Monica
If you have actually made the challenging private decision to terminate your marriage or domestic partnership in Santa Monica, California, you should hope that your case will be an uncontested divorce in Santa Monica.
An uncontested divorce merely denotes a
divorce in which you and your spouse/partner are not (and will not be) contending any points – including child custody, visitation, parenting, child support, spousal assistance or the separating of assets and financial obligation. It
does not have to suggest that you are friends or that either of you is happy about the divorce. It simply means that there will not be any court contest in the matter. Stated differently, the spouse/partner who did not file the case will not submit a Response to object to the case and will not tell the court that there is at least one issue in dispute.
An uncontested divorce in Santa Monica likewise does not need to imply that there are absolutely no issues that are not in agreement among you and your spouse/partner. Typically there will be issues in dispute between the parties in an uncontested case. However, they are either minor concerns or at the very least concerns that you and your spouse will resolve between you without a Response being filed at court by your spouse/partner.
If you do have an uncontested divorce in Santa Monica, the main reason you are lucky is that you will be able to benefit from both of the two optimal uncontested divorce industry developments of the last 20 years – online divorce and unbundled legal services. Let’s take a look at each of those trends with reference to uncontested divorce in Santa Monica.
Online Divorce in Santa Monica
What exactly does online divorce signify? It denotes that you will use a safe and secure (encrypted) online connection to access your own password-protected online divorce account to enter all of the details in your case from the comfort of your own home or office. You will not be handed the intimidating 30-page hard-copy questionnaire and advised to fill it out by hand while you find yourself in a lawyer’s waiting area. You will have the ability to enter your case data at your own pace from any Internet-connected device.
Built into the online divorce interview will be a full context-sensitive help system. You will have the ability to finish your online divorce interview in any number of sessions. Each time you log out, your data is safely and securely saved using cutting edge database security – both physical and electronic. When you log back into your account, your personal data will be there waiting for you.
An online divorce will also guarantee that you will have the ability to modify and alter your data at all times up till your case has actually been submitted at your local Superior Court. When your case has been filed at Superior Court, you will still be able to change the majority of your case data, including your economic information, but there will be certain legal and security limitations on changing some information that is already part of the Superior Court record.
After you have actually wrapped up the online divorce interview, you click a button to inspect your interview. The system will check all pages for completion, making you familiar with any pages that still require attention. Additionally, the interview will evaluate any time-critical elements of your case to ensure that there is no approaching important time frame, based on the details of your case, such as a child’s approaching 18th birthday. Thirdly, the interview check will prompt you to indicate that there have indeed been no changes to primary matters since the time you completed the interview. As soon as those 3 checks have indeed been finished successfully, you just click a button that states, “Continue to Lawyer Evaluation.”
At that point, your Online Divorce Lawyer will be activated by email to review your online divorce interview, download the correct batches of completed legal docs and contact you to make plans with you for a case strategy conversation and a doc evaluation. Consult your Online Divorce Lawyer how this will be done. Often this will be a face-to-face conference. Sometimes, this will be done by Zoom or email and phone.
Once the case has actually been evaluated and the completed legal papers downloaded, reviewed and signed and dated by yourself, your uncontested divorce will be ready to be filed at your local Superior Court.
Watch Our Introductory Video on Online Divorce Interviews:
Unbundled Legal Services in Santa Monica
What are unbundled legal services? They are services supplied by a lawyer, primarily in specialties of consumer law, such as uncontested divorce, where the lawyer is not contracted on a full traditional basis to carry out every act required to achieve a final legal goal, such as to acquire a divorce. Instead, you, the divorce customer, do all of the leg work in your own case however employ the lawyer only to deliver services in the areas where you need that lawyer’s skill and knowledge.
Unbundled legal services are often called limited legal services or limited scope representation. These are all the same thing. Unbundled legal services are not new. The State Bar of California was providing guidelines and providing materials on unbundled legal services as far back as 2001. Nevertheless, attorneys have actually been slow-moving to take advantage of unbundled. Part of the cause is that unbundled services have indeed been seen by numerous lawyers as absolutely nothing more than a chance to make less money for offering less services.
That kind of thinking is why lawyers are usually not considered great business people. Such a lawyer would quote a $7500 charge for an uncontested divorce to 20 target clients a month and not be worried when only one individual employs them. In such a scenario, the lawyer has spent maybe 5 hours prospecting clients and has grossed $7500 without in fact having done any legal work.
Far more effective is for that lawyer to include another alternative and to inform the target client about the two options upfront. ” My flat cost for an uncontested divorce in Santa Monica is $7500. That’s where I do every single thing for you: a 30-minute face-to-face assessment, file preparation, case review, strategy discussion, a legal rights examination, filing at the regional Superior Court, service of documentation on your partner, extra phone calls at $250/hour with a minimum of 15 minutes per call and walking through your final judgment to the judge for approval and signature. However, as I recognize that divorce is normally a period of financial trouble for most people, I have actually added a more economical choice, namely an unbundled document assessment service in an uncontested divorce for $1200. This includes an online documentation generation service, document evaluation and a 20-minute telephone case review and 2 follow-up e-mail replies (more can be bought). You would handle your own filing at Superior Court and organize your own service of documents on your spouse under my direction.”
Because there are people who want to pay a lawyer $7500 to do everything, in this scenario, 1 of those 20 people will still not resent the cost and will still pay that $7500. Nevertheless, as the $1200 (or thereabouts – each law firm is separately owned and operated) is comparable to the total costs charged by some online divorce mills and is a far better offer, those 19 targeted customers will not simply leave permanently. 2 or 4 of them will acknowledge the deal and will take that $1200 service to have a regional lawyer on their team.
So now, the lawyer has indeed still invested 5 hours prospecting, but with the two choices offered, he’s got one client at $7500 and perhaps 3 at $1200. That’s $11,100 in gross income for the same amount of prospecting..
This is simply an example, obviously, however it is a reasonable example. Factors to consider like this are why more and more divorce lawyers in Santa Monica are building unbundled services into their menu of options for an uncontested divorce.
Avoid Unlicensed Unregulated Out-of-State Online Divorce Mills – They Are a Disaster!
About 2 dozen online divorce mills have dominated the online divorce market since the start of the Internet. All but one or two are located outside California. Two are in India. They are unlicensed, unregulated and totally unaccountable. They are a disaster. See our assessment table. They declare to be able to handle uncontested divorce in each of the 3000+ counties in the United States – an impossibility. They make numerous screw-ups. They do not know the rules and policies of your local Superior Court. Only a regional lawyer will know California law and the guidelines and policies of your local Superior Court and even the practices of individual regional Superior Court judges. Employing an unlicensed online divorce mill will be like the blind leading the blind.
Additionally, those 2 dozen online divorce mills are full of fraud – all kinds of fraud. There are price fraud, up-selling and testimonial fraud.
For Many, an Uncontested Divorce will also be an Online Divorce. Watch Our Video on Online Divorce Fraud. This Could Be a Feature Length Movie, but We've Kept It Short. You'll Get the Idea:
Conclusion
Thanks for reading and I hope this has helped get you on the right track for your uncontested divorce in Santa Monica.
So how do you take advantage of (1) wicked-cool online divorce apps while using (2) competitively-priced unbundled legal services offered by a local lawyer and (3) avoid the fraud swamp of online divorce mills? Easy! Get the Best of Both Worlds. These are all licensed California lawyers who are competitively priced when compared to out-of-state online divorce mills. And you won’t get cheated.
Either of the following 2 options will get you hooked up:
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.