This article is about the California divorce process and the costs associated with getting divorced. We compare the costs of divorce of using a divorce attorney and using the services of our divorce legal document preparation service in California.
Please feel free to watch the video below. We also have included the transcribed version of the video.
Hi, this is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Today we are doing another live broadcast and are also having this transcribed at the same time so we can embed this into our blog and uploaded this to an audio file. This is if our computer can keep up with that.
So today we’re talking about the divorce costs and specifically going to talk about the difference between the cost of hiring an attorney to do your California divorce or hiring someone like my firm, which we are legal document assistants.
First off, let me tell you what a legal document assistant is. We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm and we just happen to specialize in the divorce process in California. We are able to work without an attorney in our office which allows us to provide a more affordable service.
So let’s get into the divorce cost attorney versus legal document assistant. So obviously attorneys are doing a much different job than we do. Mostly the divorce process is completing paperwork. There are occasions where you may need attorney and that’s if you need legal advice or if you need to be represented in court. Those are the two things that we are unable to do. Our license does not allow us to do that. And that’s because we are not attorneys. So if you feel that you will need legal advice or you’ll need to go to court to be represented that there you probably will need an attorney.
So lets back up just a bit and talk about the beginning of the divorce process in California. The California divorce process is mostly made up of paperwork. You have you’re initial documents that need to be completed followed by doing your financial disclosures which these do no require an attorney. In fact, the divorce process in California can be completed entirely by a legal document preparation firm such as ours without any attorney supervision or without you ever needing to speak with an attorney.
Now we do have clients who start with us and they know they may need attorney down the road, but they want to get as much of the paperwork done as possible before going out and hiring attorney. So lets talk about the cost little bit. The average cost to have your divorce completed by an attorney and this is some research I’ve done online. You can find it as well if you were to look for it is about $20,000. And that’s $20,000 per person, not the total of both parties.
We have clients who call us who have spoke with attorneys and they are to shocked by the amount of money that they are going to charge them for the divorce after they’ve talk to an attorney. They generally will call our company to find out if there are some other form options for the divorce case. So when we talk to them go weeks find them the difference you want people to understand that there is a difference between what attorneys doing what we do, but the end of the day we can help clients get through the entire divorce process from start to finish without any attorney supervision and without you ever needing to speak to an attorney.
Now if there it we run into trouble, and you do need to legal advice, not a problem. We can always refer you to an attorney in your area and you can get some legal advice a consultation if you need be, and then we can get right back to work for you. We can always just do that for you and you don’t have to hire the attorney to do that for you.
My name is Tim Blankenship. We are licensed and bonded legal document preparation service specialize in divorce. When you use our services. We worked on a flat fee basis. We do not use a retainer fee. We will quote you a flat fee for your divorce and that will be the total cost start to finish. We do everything for you from filing initial paperwork to prepare all the forms. We taken down everything to the court for you and this is a complete service from start to finish, meaning from initial forms to service to judgment all for a flat fee.
You can go to our website at divorce661.com and we have some pricing packages you can see, based upon at the amount of work that needs to be done if you have children if you have property that needs to be separated those all are determining factors on the total cost of your divorce. And feel free to look at our pricing page for more information.
Going back to retainers and how those work many people tell us that they spoke to an attorney and he told them the cost would be say $3500 or $4000. Now what that is is that’s just a retainer that’s not the total cost of your divorce. The total cost your divorce is going to be whatever it takes at that attorney’s hourly rate to get the case finished. So if they’re asking for 3500 $4000 or $5000. That number doesn’t really matter because they are going to bill at their hourly rates if it’s $300, $400, $500 an hour. They will bill you at that hourly rate until that monies extinguished and if your divorce cases is not finished you’re on the hook for the difference.
So that’s how divorce cases can end up in the $20,000 range. Based on the high attorney hourly rates. So if you’re looking for more affordable service to get your divorce completed and if your case is mostly amicable in nature, even if it’s not amicable, even if you know your going to need a divorce attorney, but you want to save some upfront costs on the document preparation we can really help you save some money by using our service.
So feel free to give me a call, my name is Tim Blankenship and our website is www.divorce661.com. My direct number is 661-281-0266.
