My custom-designed online law office and filing system cuts attorney time (and fees) down to only what is absolutely necessary. Other lawyers have to charge nearly twice as much for the same result. The fastest way to get it over with is to start filling out my required information at any time of day after purchasing at the order page. What about do-it-yourself software? When you do a divorce through me you are dealing with a human being whose name is ROBERT, not a machine, or answering service.   You can't have a problem because there is no passing the buck to somebody who does not know the answer. Having programmed games in BASIC at age 12, my system is designed only for Washington divorce cases; not generic regurgitation for any state's forms. Even the simplest divorces will take 3-4 hours with those systems. And that is 3-4 hours before you find out in 90 days, that you have to file your whole case over.

I've seen 500 divorces cases and know in an instant whether something can or can't be done and exactly what information I need from you. My online system knows you already: and it softly elicits just what I need. If it doesn't I email you for clarification not vice versa. This is not even considering the risks of using a do-it-yourself system:

WARNING RE DO-IT-YOURSELF SOFTWARE: If you have no kids or property to worry about, or are very poor and/or your time is not very valuable to you, it might be worthwhile to call your local Courthouse for the $35 divorce packet and do the documents yourself. Otherwise please read the disclaimers. What follows is a link to a document (which contains case law dealing with document errors in divorce), which I prepared for a former client of mine: one of the victims of these online systems. I am currently consulting on a software system where there is attorney input, but it is not the same as most of these nationwide systems that do not truly give you a complete case. One of my clients had the "privilege" of coming to me and paying $3,000 in attorney fees to correct a case she and her husband wanted to save money on: first motion to correct errors. The errors in her documents were not discovered until years after the fact: the ex-husband's new spouse "inspired" a new vision of their original, hasty but cheap divorce documents. The original Court gladly signed those first documents because they we're correct in form and I would have signed them if I was the Judge as well. However, given the custody arrangment, there was no accounting within the original support Order for the shared custody both mother and father believed they would be pursuing in the best interests of the children. No automatic adjustments or escalator clauses meant that a support debt slowly and silently accumulated with neither of them knowing about it. (By the way we won the case and I saved my client $17,934. But not before she wasted $3,000 and had her credit ruined.) She paid the service $239.00, when she could have hired me as her attorney for $445.00. The same service without kids is still $239 where mine drops to $350.00 with no kids. The system also screwed her as to Lincoln County because both were living in other counties with a shared parenting plan. Filing in Lincoln county is just fine, but what about later venue issues? Every year a few people have to actually travel there to deal with divorce cases gone bad. It happens when the two start fighting after signing one document and filing it there without the others executed or provided for. My divorces have enforceability before I lick the first stamp to send it to the Courthouse. They also deal with venue if a party tries refute the agreement during the 90 day waiting period.

Having an attorney do your divorce will also save you the time you will spend figuring out how to file your divorce on your own in the first place.  If you don't think it will be a frustrating process to get the details right, you are kidding yourself.  I also would like to mention that you get to sit in Court with 30 other couples for 3 hours hoping that you did things properly.  With me you avoid a Court hearing because I am familiar with the process of filing in certain counties that don't require a Court hearing.  Even after graduating from law school, the first uncontested divorce I handled took no less than 8-10 hours of messing around with mistakes and I had to be corrected by the Court clerk twice.  The other services which teach you "how to comply with no-court appearance requirements...", really just take you down their own little path of red-tape which they had to go through. They tell how to solve the problems they had, but forget that you could have your own. No money or kids? Well then which party meets residency for petitioner status? Will you move out of state before the 90 days is up when at the same time the other spouse has never set foot in state? Did you execute joinder properly when either could challenge the divorce for residency at a later date?