Divorce online: faster, cheaper, and lawyer-free

Until a few months ago, business cards were the only thing Valentino Agundez had bought online. But in March, she decided to use the Internet to purchase something more permanent: a divorce.

The kindergarten teacher and her husband were already separated, but had put off making their split official because of the legal fees. Then a friend suggested a website that offered to prepare the paperwork for $249.

"I kind of felt weird about it, because it was over the Internet. But when I went online, it was really easy," says Ms. Agundez, who is in her early 20s and lives in Hollywood, Calif.

Agundez is one of a growing number of Americans who use the Internet to help with their divorces, bypassing attorneys to prepare documents on their own.

Many go online to save money and forgo the emotional clashes that can play out in lawyers' offices. But as states move toward allowing divorces to be actually filed online, critics say it could make the process of breaking up as easy as ordering movie tickets - and push up the already high number of divorces in the United States.

"People are going to enter into marriage much more casually with something like this available," says Jan LaRue, chief counsel of the conservative group Concerned Women for America. "The idea of [divorce] becoming faster and cheaper - to me, that doesn't help the idea of marriage."

It may be a year or more before filing for divorce online is truly possible, but using the Internet to help with the process has already caught on - pushed ahead by two other trends: more people representing themselves in legal matters and growing comfort with handling paperwork, such as taxes, online.

For Agundez, who used a site called LegalZoom.com, the Internet changed her perception of how much time and drama were involved in the divorce process. "The Internet responds to you right away, and that's not the way I pictured divorce," she says.

LegalZoom and CompleteCase.com, another national site that helps with uncontested divorces, say that since they launched in 2001, they've served approximately 30,000 and 20,000 divorce customers respectively.

In May, the number of divorce packages sold by LegalZoom - which also handles other legal documents, like wills - was up by 43 percent over May of 2002, according to the company's CEO, Brian Liu. CompleteCase, which only handles divorces, has also grown significantly - and has spawned a bevy of copycats.

Do-it-yourself divorcing may be a boon for online companies - which offer document preparation and services that range from under $50 to $1,000 or more - but it can complicate things for state and local courts, which is one reason so many of them have also entered the Internet fray.

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