Summary
CompleteCase boasts high customer satisfaction and a sleek web portal that’s mobile-friendly.
Although it’s as detailed and comprehensive as the best of its competitors, it’s aggressive upselling of other services and its subscription-based pricing leave users who don’t need those services feeling annoyed. On the other hand, users who do need higher-touch services such as handling the court filing or drafting qualified domestic relations orders for dividing retirement assets will be glad to have the option.
We give CompleteCase an overall rating of 4 stars.
We paid the standard $299 fee to access CompleteCase.com for the purposes of this review.
What is CompleteCase?
CompleteCase is an online service for couples who want an uncontested divorce.
It guides you through a detailed set of questions about your marriage, finances, property division, debt obligations, children and other essential topics. With your answers, it generates all the documentation and forms you’ll need to going to court and finalizing your divorce.
You get access to an online portal where you can edit and download your documents for up to 30 days, or longer if you pay a subscription fee.
CompleteCase has been operating since 2000 and is a well-respected business, enjoying a BetterBusinessBureau rating of A- and an average 4.2 star rating on TrustPilot. It’s been mentioned on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS, and in Time magazine.
You can call its customer support line and speak to a real person. It guarantees its service and will issue refunds if a customer is dissatisfied with its services within 30 days of purchasing.
How does CompleteCase work?
Step 1: Eligibility
CompleteCase first makes sure you’re eligible for their service. You can only use them if you know where your spouse lives and you both want an uncontested divorce.
Then, you fill in basic information about you and your marriage. Finally, you create a CompleteCase account and pay.
Step 2: Detailed Questionnaire
The next step after making an account is a detailed questionnaire that gathers additional information about you, your spouse, your children and other aspects of your marriage. This is what will take the most time.
Step 3: Generate documents
The last step is to generate the documents you’ll need to file your divorce with the court. CompleteCase differs from other online services at this point.
Instead of getting your documents immediately, CompleteCase promises them in 2 business days or less, which they imply is delayed due to COVID-19 (in May 2022) compared to what they usually are able to offer.
Why there’s any delay between completing the questionnaire and receiving your documents is a mystery. We speculate that potentially not everything is fully automated. Maybe, instead of automatically filling out all the PDF forms, a CompleteCase employee has to manually do some data input. We don’t know for sure, but it’s hard to figure out why else you would have to wait at all.
After you get the documents, you’ll also receive instructions for how to serve your spouse, file the documents with the court, and make your divorce official.
If you don’t have a printer, you’ll need to either take the PDFs to a local print shop or pay CompleteCase to mail them to you ($20 fee for USPS priority mail).
It’s at this point that you need to double check all your answers. According to CompleteCase’s Forms and Filing Instructions page, “You can make minor changes at any time, but major changes such as changing the filing party or the state of filing will incur additional fees.”
Our Experience
We paid for and tried CompleteCase for a Connecticut divorce. We challenged it to handle a more-complicated-than-usual divorce:
Three minor children
One spouse was in the military
Frequent moves in the recent past
Uneven debt obligations between the husband and wife
Spousal maintenance
Child support
A custom child custody schedule (aka parenting plan)
It took us about an hour to fill out the questionnaire. How realistic is that for the average person getting a divorce?
If you look at the total amount of time spent sitting in front of the computer answering questions, anywhere between one and two hours is very realistic for the average person.
However, that assumes that you and your current spouse have discussed all the major topics and the questionnaire doesn’t prompt any additional conversations.
For most people, filling out the form will be a stop-and-go process. Have you really hammered out all the details of how to divvy up retirement savings? Do you have an exhaustive list of all the property you will get vs. what your spouse will get?
The best approach is probably to budget an hour to complete as many questions as you can alone. Write down any discussion points that need addressing with your current spouse. As you have those conversations, you can complete the outstanding questions in CompleteCase.
Upsells
A potential positive for some people and a negative for others, including us, was the number of upsells CompleteCase pushes during the form-filling process. We counted no fewer than six different promotions, ranging from an additional $14-319 in fees.
First, the positive about this. The reality is that many people actually need these additional documents or services.
For example, if you’re giving up your interest in a piece of valuable property to your spouse, you do need a quitclaim document that officially disavows your ownership of that property. CompleteCase offers this for $14.95 extra.
Or, if you have retirement benefits you’re unsure how to divide, then paying the additional $250 for a QDRO (Qualified Domestic Relations Order) draft might be a very good deal for you compared to having an attorney do the same thing.
The average person, however, will find the number of upsells that pop up in front of the main form and block the screen pretty aggravating. As the cherry on top, most of which don’t have an obvious “no thank you” button, so you have to hunt for the link that lets you get back to work.
If the core service were free, we would understand. But we’re already paying $299 — that’s a lot of money to suffer additional promotions.
What we liked
Thanks to CompleteCase’s modern web app, you can do everything on your phone if you’d like
The questions are detailed and comprehensive
If you do have additional needs, CompleteCase offers additional products and partner services that will genuinely help you out
What we didn’t like
That you don’t get your documents immediately — as of May 2022 there’s an “up to 2 business day” delay (see above for our speculation as to why)
That you have to pay to get a copy mailed to you ($20 as of 2022)
That major edits will incur additional, unspecified, fees
That you have to pay for continuing access to the CompleteCase portal, and that you’re automatically signed up to do so at $39.99 per month
What does it cost?
CompleteCase costs $299 for the core divorce forms generation service. That gets you all the forms generated in PDF form, plus access to their portal for 30 days.
Beyond 30 days, you’ll need to pay $39.99 per month, which is a subscription fee that CompleteCase automatically signs you up for. We would prefer if CompleteCase gave users an idea of how long the typical user pays for access so that it’s clearer what you’re realistically signing up for when you give them your payment information.
In addition, as we mention above, CompleteCase offers more products and services on top of its core document generation service. Those include:
It’s Platinum service, for $319 (or maybe less, we also were offered it for $299 later on in our testing). This gets you various additional services, but the most notable is that CompleteCase will file your forms in court for you — so that in many cases you don’t even need to show up unless the judge specifically requests it.
QDRO drafting for $250 by QDRO Counsel — this is for dividing up retirement benefits
A Quitclaim deed for $14.95 — this is for disavowing interest in specific property
A parent education course — mandatory in almost all states for parents with minor children — for $89.99. In many states you’ll be able to find cheaper courses, also available online.
Does CompleteCase offer a guarantee?
CompleteCase offers a “100% Satisfaction Guarantee”. In their words:
“At CompleteCase, we care about our customers and stand by the quality of our services – so we’ll refund our fees within the first 30 days of purchase if you’re unhappy with our services. Call or email us and we’ll process your refund.”
If you sign up for their Platinum service, they increase that to guaranteeing that the court will approve your divorce forms (user error notwithstanding).
Our final verdict
If you’re looking for a trustworthy divorce service that comes with all the bells and whistles, then CompleteCase is a good option. It’s the only online divorce service that offers a modern, streamlined interface you can use on your phone. Just be sure to avoid paying for additional services you don’t need (you can always get them later if you want).