Good way to get divorced without ever talking to a lawyer?
Me and my now-ex-wife wanted to have a simple divorce with no headache. To our surprise, you can't quickly and simply divorce in California! Maybe if you have a law degree it's simpler, but we didn't, and we're busy people to study all the forms ourselves...
We first contacted a bunch of "classic" lawyers in our area and they quoted us some ridiculous amounts. On top of that, I felt like those lawyers were trying to overcomplicate things — I was worried the divorce would get more difficult. Only then we found IOE, and we were delighted that their "all inclusive" quote was less than half of what we got quoted previously.
We decided to try IOE. It was over... mostly easy? Basically you fill out some forms online and — as long as your case is simple enough — it generates the necessary documents for the IOE staff to review and tweak, and send for your signature. And then you wait...
It was not fast! The local court was very slow doing anything during COVID. Unfortunately, It's Over Easy (or any other lawyer, for that matter) doesn't have any additional visibility into what is the situation around your case with a court. So if your local court is slow/bad, IOE can only do so much for you when you wait... Most of the process that IOE has control over was reasonably fast though.
One of the mistakes I've made was assuming that they online forms represent all you can enter. Some of my income/assets didn't fit their questionnaire very well — turns out all I needed was email them and they helped tweak the "actual" forms generated for the court. So don't think about it as an electronic check-in to your flight where you get the print-out instantly; rather, it's just a convenient way to explain the IOE staff what your case is like.
The other thing that in hindsight could have been better was the communication of the timelines. Once you file for a divorce, there's a 6 month "cooldown" period. I thought I can just wait for half a year, then fill out a couple more forms, wait for a couple of days, and file the final forms with the court. What happened in reality is that once the cooldown period ended there were a bunch more forms than I anticipated, and it took us ~6 extra weeks after the cooldown period. None of those forms were actually blocked by the cooldown period, so had I known I would have started those forms a few weeks before the cooldown end.
If I had a time machine, would I use IOE again? Yes.
27 February 2022
Unprompted review