Offering a simpler and cheaper path to divorce, an ever-growing array of dotcoms, computer-savvy lawyers and state court officials are encouraging unhappily married Americans to arrange their breakups online.
For fees ranging from $50 to $300 — a small fraction of what most lawyers charge even for an uncontested divorce — couples can obtain the appropriate forms and varying degrees of help completing them.
The phenomenon is spreading. Rival firms CompleteCase.com and LegalZoom.com each say they have served 20 000 clients nationwide in less than three years of operation. Hits on the divorce section of the California court system’s do-it-youself website soared from 6 800 in May 2002 to about 15 000 last month.
”It’s similar to the growth of online travel services and online stock trading,” said Brian Lee, president of Los Angeles-based LegalZoom. ”People are learning they don’t need a travel agent or a stockbroker or a lawyer — they can do it themselves.”
Many clients may still have to appear in court, but — in theory, at least — they will have all required paperwork with them and will be able to represent themselves.
”For me, it was a purely economic decision,” said John Chang, of South Pasadena, California, who paid LegalZoom $300 to help him obtain an uncontested divorce last year.
”I filled out the forms in the course of a night — it took three hours — and saved $2 000,” he said.
Reactions to the trend vary. Some religious leaders are dismayed that divorce can be made even easier. The American Bar Association (ABA) wants to ensure that dotcoms don’t engage in the unauthorised practice of law and is studying how its members can serve divorcing couples without high fees.
”A lot of what’s happening is a very understandable rebellion against how expensive it is to go through the court process,” said Sandra Morris, a San Diego lawyer who is president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
The do-it-yourself services acknowledge that online divorce doesn’t work when spouses disagree on any substantive issue. Linda Elrod, a professor at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas, said couples who have children, complex finances or even a pension plan to be divided should consult a lawyer.
Even in a supposedly uncontested online divorce, each spouse should be cautious, Morris advised.
”Very often in a marital relationship, there’s not a complete balance of knowledge and power,” Morris said. ”In an effort to settle in an amicable way, they may be settling more in one person’s way than the other.”
Some dotcom services, such as MyLawyer.com, simply provide forms for clients to fill out. Others, like CompleteCase, gather client information through questionnaires and then have employees complete the official forms.
The major online companies all state on their websites that they are not law firms and don’t sell legal advice.
However, the ABA’s eLawyering Task Force has questioned whether some online clients may falsely conclude — based on sales pitches — that their divorce forms will undergo substantive review by a lawyer.
But Richard Granat, a Maryland attorney who founded MyLawyer.com, says the ABA should encourage its members to provide less expensive, divorce-related services that can compete with non-law online companies.
CompleteCase CEO Randy Finney, also an attorney, said traditional divorce lawyers should not worry about competition from online companies.
”The bread and butter for divorce lawyers is the contested case, where the fees start at $3 000, $4 000,” he said.
”A little uncontested case is not that big a piece of the action.”
For leaders of the Marriage Movement — a coalition of religious and other groups seeking to promote strong marriages — online divorce is part of a lamentable trend.
”Almost everything we’ve done in the last 200 years has made divorce easier,” said Mike McManus, founder of a Potomac, Maryland, organisation called Marriage Savers.
”You want to slow down the process, not speed it up.” ‒ Sapa-AP