Why You Don’t Want To Use LegalZoom For Your Santa Clarita Divorce
Today I’m talking to you about the pros and cons of using LegalZoom for your Santa Clarita divorce.
I just stepped into the office and return the phone call I received over the weekend for the client in Santa Clarita saying they have a simple divorce, no cases, no property and by the time I returned their call, he mentioned he had already used another service.
I asked him who you end up using, and he said that he is using LegalZoom.
And there’s really a lot of cons, I should say. Negatives to using LegalZoom and I want to talk to you about that a little bit.
The first thing is, you have to do everything yourself. They’re going to give you a form, questionnaire that you pay for. I think its $299. And you’re going to have to fill out all the questions on this questionnaire online.
Then what happens is they’ll print out the documents for you and basically what it does is it’ll take the information you plug into the questionnaire and place it into the forms.
The bad part about that is nobody is going to review your documentation. It’s all computerized.
I had a client that used LegalZoom and they filled out the forms incorrectly, printed them, they were delivered to their home, couple of days or weeks later. And they received some of the forms blank, some of the forms are wrong.
But it’s all because the information they plug in there was incorrect or in the wrong spots so you have to be careful for that.
Probably, the worst thing about using any of these types of services, LegalZoom or any of these document assembly services is that you have to do all the leg work and you’re going to have twice the fees so let’s talk about that.
When you use these types of services, you’re going to have to do the leg work.
You’re going to have to go down the court. You’re going to have to follow the procedures of court. You’re going to file your form, serve your forms, file all the documentations. Do all your financial disclosures and do the same for your spouse as well.
Where people get hung up is on the procedure. Filing of the forms is done correctly but the procedure can be done wrong and this includes the judgment which is your final agreement which can be very difficult to complete.
When that happens, you want to make sure you’re using a service, someone you can call like us. Who can take care of that.
The leg work is all going to be on you.
Now, another issue with these document assembly service like this is that you’re going to have to pay twice the amount of fees. When you file for a divorce in California, when you file you have to pay a filing fee and when your spouse files a response, she has to pay a filing fee.
When you use these online service providers, their directions require you to file the fees twice. You have a response fee and you’re going to have a fee for the petition.
Now, you’re going to have to pay, that’s almost $900 in fees for court services because LegalZoom can’t tell you that there is a process in LA County where you can get away with only one filing fee.
So, it’s going to be twice as expensive from the court fee perspective.
You’re going to do all the leg work and at the end of the day when you use our service, even though we have a higher cost for doing it. You are going to be out the door a lot less money than you would be using these online service providers.
Now, quickly what we do is we’ll prepare, file and serve all your documents. We go down the court. We do all the leg work. And you only have to pay one filing fee.
When you use our service, and because you only have one filing fee, our higher costs are absorbed by that lack of not having to pay that filing fee.
Therefore, the costs are the same or less when you use our service as supposed to one of these online services and we’re doing all the work for you.
I just wanted to get that across to you, if you’re in Santa Clarita thinking of using one of these online services, please give us a call. We’d be happy to go down and show you how our pricing are less and how we can do all the work for you.
Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.
Give me a call. 661-281-0266 or visit our website at divorce661.com for more information.