Have You Asked A Divorce Question On AVVO.com

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

If you are ever doing research or looking for information about divorce in California, you may come across a website called Avvo (dot) com.  I have found this site to be nothing more than lead generation tool for attorneys and not a resource for valuable information.

They say they are an expert only question and answer forum where people can ask legal questions of lawyers for free.  It is true that you can ask questions for free.  And attorneys will even answer the questions….  Or will they?

I read the answers that the divorce attorneys give and they are laughable.  I say this because their answers are so generic that they lack any real value.

It seems that the only reason that the attorneys are part of Avvo is so they can get their name in front of people looking for advice so they can hopefully get their business.  Attorneys are afraid that if they give the answer, the client will never need them.

This is so far from the truth.

I give out information all the time on how to complete the divorce process.  Some of the people use me and others are so grateful for the information, they end up using my service.

I have to admit that some of the questions asked by folks are not clear and therefore they do not get a clear answer, but I did a little test of my own.

I posted a very specific question that would require a very specific answer.

The answers not only did not give any helpful advice, but the attorneys that did answer ended their reply with “I suggest that you speak to an attorney for assistance”.

What you will notice throughout avvo is that all the attorneys will say you need to speak to an attorney.  So it appears that there is no real help to be obtained here, rather just a trap to get attorneys in front of you.

I am sure the divorce attorneys are paying a pretty penny to be a part of the forums being promised they can get clients from responding to potential clients needs.  I have a feeling nobody is getting what they thought they were getting.

We are a licensed and bonded divorce document preparation service that specializes in divorce.  If you have a question about divorce, feel free to call us.  You can find lots of information on this blog or by watching our videos.

We are headquartered in Santa Clarita, California and can help you with your divorce anywhere in California.

Establishing Paternity During California Divorce Process

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This article is about establishing paternity during the California divorce process.  This pertains to you if you had a child with your spouse before you were married.  In particular, we are going to discuss an often missed issue when filing the Petition in your California divorce.

If you are getting divorced and had a child born before you were married, you will have to establish paternity. This is basically a fancy way of having a legal proceeding where the court says that the father, is in fact, the father.

The good news is that if you are getting a divorce, you can establish paternity during the same divorce process. You won’t have to file a separate paternity action with the court.

What I want to discuss now is about filing the actual divorce Petition in California.  When you fill out the Petition, you have to state certain statistical facts such as the date of marriage, date of separation, who gets legal and physical custody, etc.

What a lot of people miss checking off is the box on page 2 of the Petition under number 7(d).  It says”

Determination of parentage of any children born to the Petitioner and Respondent prior to marriage.

If the two of you had a child born before the marriage you need to check this box.  If you do not check this box, the Court will not check to make sure you did or not.  The problem is if you do not check the box and try to finish your divorce, the entire case will be rejected when you go to submit your judgment.

Even worse is that you will have to file an amended Petition and re-serve the Petition on your spouse.  And guess what?  You now have to wait the 30 days again before you can file your judgment.

We are a licensed and bonded divorce paralegal service (legal document assistant firm) specializing in California divorce.  Please give us a call for more information or assistance with your divorce in California.

Santa Clarita Paternity Court Service | Establish Paternity

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We get a decent amount of Paternity cases in our divorce office in Santa Clarita and realized we don’t write much about it.  We are going to take a few days to discuss paternity and what it means.

If you have a child before you are married, you will need to establish paternity.  This means to have the father of the child officially determined by the court to be the father.

When you have a child prior to marriage, the mother is obviously known as she gave birth.  When you are married, the husband of the marriage is presumed to be the father.  But without being married, there is no presumption of who the father is.

This means Paternity needs to be established.  It Is important to establish paternity because technically, until the father has been established “as the father” they don’t have any real legal rights to custody or visitation, etc.

And if your are the mother, and hoping for child support, until who the father is, has been established, the court cannot make orders for child support.

A paternity case follows suit pretty much as the divorce process does.

The paperwork is different, of course, but how you file and serve and request order are pretty much the same.

You will need to first file a petition to establish paternity.  This petition will need to served on the other party.  In most the cases we have handled, there is no dispute over who the father is.  We are just working on officially having the father established.

In many cases, the father may appear on the birth certificate or may have signed a declaration of paternity in the hospital. These all help in establishing paternity with the courts, but you still have to file a paternity case with the court to officially establish who the father is.

Does Facebook Marketing For Divorce Services Work?

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

I have a divorce paralegal business in Santa Clarita, CA and have done well with online marketing.  I have been experimenting with Facebook advertising and wanted to share what I have learned and perhaps get comments from others in the divorce industry such as attorneys and mediators, etc.

I have spent more time than I would like to admit on testing Facebook marketing.  I have placed advertising on the right hand side of Facebook.  You know the annoying ads on the right hand side.  Honestly, I don’t even notice that there are ads there anymore.  I did get lots of clicks but no  conversions or phone calls that I can say translated into new business.

I then started seeing business’s market by using the “Related Posts” on Facebook.  After several hours I did figure out how to property use the promoted posts and I did get some business out of it.  I also got a lot of people liking my page.

It seemed like this was a good way of advertising at first, until I saw how much I was being charged.  I had set a daily budget of $100 and Facebook made sure to eat all that money up every day.  I could not figure out why my costs were so high when  the estimated price per click was supposed to be less than a dollar each.

What I learned is that folks clicking on the ad did not necessarily have to click on “like” which was what I was after.  So the net result was I was spending $7.00 per like on Facebook.

Unless someone has another thought on the matter, my impression is that it is not worth $7.00 just to have someone like my page.  I don’t even pay $7.00 per click on Google Adwords.

So do you think Facebook Marketing works for those providing divorce services?  I would have to say that my campaign was a wash.  The business generated on the promotion was just enough to pay for the ads.  Not something I necessarily want to duplicate.

We are a licensed and bonded divorce paralegal service (Legal Document Assistant).  We specialize in providing affordable divorce services in California.

Get Your Los Angeles Divorce Finalized By End Of Year 2013

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We just received a notice from the Los Angeles Superior Court, Family Law Department, Downtown (Central) Courthouse.

The memo stated that in order to have your Los Angeles Divorce finalized and approved by the court by the end of the year, you need to have your final judgment submitted to the court on or before October 25, 2013.

So for those of you self represented clients who have had trouble preparing your own divorce and have not made progress, now is the time to get our help.  If you want to have your divorce finalized by the end of 2013, you need to call us so we can wrap things for you.

This deadline for submission of the divorce judgment is specifically for the Downtown Los Angeles (Central) Courthouse located at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse at 111 N. Hill street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

This is great news if you are one of our existing clients.  Yes, I am talking to you who call me every week for a status on your divorce.  What I normally have to tell our clients is that once we submit the judgment to the court it is out of our hands and we simply have to wait for the court to get to their file to approve it.

For those of you with divorce cases downtown and who submit their judgment before October 25, 2013, it seems you will have your divorce completed by the end of the year.

But wait. Let me throw a wrench into this.  What happens if your divorce judgment is rejected?  This happens more than you think.  In fact it happens to people 3 to 4 times in some cases before the judgment finally gets reviewed.

If your divorce judgment was rejected and you want to get it resubmitted by the deadline, give us a call.  We have a judgment review process where we can quickly review you entire case and make the necessary corrections and get it resubmitted.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service that specializes in California divorce.

Completing California Divorce Property Judgment Correctly

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

If you are representing yourself in your divorce in California and are now working on your divorce judgment package, make sure to read this article.

You will soon find (or have found) that the divorce judgment package is the most difficult part of the divorce paperwork.  People routinely have their divorce judgment packages rejected 2, 3 and even 4 times adding years to the day they finalize their divorce.

This article is specifically about the property order portion of the divorce judgment.  This is the part where you are listing your property and who is getting what.  It is divided up by community property and separate property.

Lately the courts have been getting very particular about how you identify your property on the judgment.  We used to be able to identify the property very basically, but now they want specific account numbers, licensed plates of vehicles, etc.

You can no longer simply say “Chase Checking Account”  You now have to list the account numbers.

Here is a list of how to properly describe your property.

  • For vehicles – Year, Make Model and License Number – If you leave out the license number of just one vehicle you risk having your judgment rejected.
  • For bank accounts, credit cards, investments, loans – List the name of the bank and the last 4 digits of the account number. You don’t want to put the full account number because technically it is public record.
  • For Homes- You need to put the full legal description of all properties.  The home address alone will not suffice.  You can get the legal description off your deed.

The above areas is where we find folks representing themselves having trouble with the judgment when submitting their divorce case.  Using the the information above will increase the odds of having your divorce judgment approved.

We have written many articles on the difficulty of getting your California divorce judgment approved by the courts.

If you have had your California divorce judgment rejected, we have a judgment review service where we can review your entire case and make sure it is correct and resubmit it for you.

If you have not completed your divorce judgment yet, this is a good time to get our assistance in preparing your divorce judgment.  We have a lot of clients that come to us for this service.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service that specializes in California divorce.  We can help you anywhere in California with your divorce case.

Default California Divorce Judgment | Can You Terminate Spousal Support

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This is a follow up article to our discussion on how to terminate spousal support on long term marriages in California.  That article spoke about how and if you can terminate spousal by agreement in your divorce.

This article will discuss how and if you can terminate spousal support when you have a long term marriage and you are filing your divorce by default.

By default, simply means that your spouse did not file a response.

The Court says that if you have a marriage over 10 years that jurisdiction for spousal support will be indefinite.  We have filed many default divorce judgments in California and the filing party wanted to terminate spousal support despite it being a long term marriage.

At first we tried to submit default judgments per the clients request, knowing that it would get rejected by the court, but sometimes that is the only way you can prove your right.

When this happened, folks going through divorce were stuck having indefinite jurisdiction on spousal support with no other options.

But you do have one last option you can use if you really want to terminate the Courts jurisdiction on spousal support on your long term marriage in California.

There is a form called “Request For Default Setting” and is form FAM-031.  This form is used when you have filed or are filing concurrently a Request To Enter Default.

If you look at the form, you will notice that you can set a default hearing if you are seeking to obtain a judgment based on the fact that you a requesting to terminate spousal support in a marriage over 10 years.

We have begun filing many of these Request For Default Settings lately because our clients don’t want to be stuck with indefinite jurisdiction over spousal support simply because their spouse did not respond.

We have not had any default hearings set yet, but we will report back when our clients begin to go to these hearings and let you now what the Court is asking in order to approve the termination of spousal support on a long term marriage default divorce judgments.

Terminating Spousal Support On Long Term Marriage | California Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We handle a lot of divorce cases in California every month an so come across a lot of different issues.

If you do your homework, you will learn that California considers any marriage over 10 years to be of long term.  As this pertains to spousal support, the Courts say that long term marriages have indefinite jurisdiction over spousal support.

What this means is that the Court will have the jurisdiction to award Spousal Support indefinitely when the marriage is over 10 years.

So here is the question.

  1. How do you terminate spousal support on long term marriages when the parties agree that they want to do so?

First, I must state that we are not a law office and not attorneys.  We just process a high volume of divorce cases in California. We cannot recite the law or give advice, we are simply explaining what we have come across and how we have handled it.

So for the first question.  How to terminate spousal support on long term marriages when the parties agree.  What we have done is to have both the parties sign a waiver. This is a waiver we drafted and include it in the judgment on the spousal support order part of the judgment.

We simply make sure to cover the reasons spousal support can normally be requested or modified.  We say the parties agree to terminate spousal support and that the order terminating spousal support is non-modifiable by either party for any reason and that regardless of future needs of spousal support or ability to pay spousal support, the court cannot make orders for spousal support.

If the parties stipulate to terminate spousal support on long term marriages, the courts will generally sign off on this.

Depending on the Court, they may reject the judgment.  We have had some Judges state that they will not approve agreements that violate the law.  They have told us that in long term marriages, the Court will retain jurisdiction indefinitely, you remarry or die.

So it appears it will depend on the Judge if you can get them to approve the judgment terminating spousal support on your long term marriage.

If you find your judgment getting rejected for this reason, one last thing you can do is file a motion (Request For Order) to enter judgment.  In the motion you can request the court grant your judgment to terminate spousal support.  You and your spouse can attend the hearing and explain to the court that you are willingly giving up this right.

We would love to hear any feedback from folks who have done this or attorneys who have had other successes.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm that specializes in divorce.  We are headquartered in Los Angeles, CA and serve all the Courts in California.

Van Nuys Divorce Motions Now 90 Days Until Hearing

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We just learned that Van Nuys divorce motions are taking 90 days to get a hearing.  This means from the time you file a Request For Order (RFO) it will be at least 90 days until you will see the judge.

(By the way, we can help you prepare a motion (request for order) if you are looking to file a motion or respond to one.)

This is bad news for those who are filing a motion with the court to modify child support or spousal support or need any type of orders for that matter.

We had previously written in the past on this topic where we reported that divorce motions were taking up to 60 days, which at the time was up from 45 days.

It appears the the service we can expect from the Los Angeles Divorce Courts are getting worse.  This is, by far, the longest time frames we have seen recently.  I spoke to our attorney service who files all our court documents everyday and they said that the Van Nuys divorce court is by far the worst when it comes to getting a hearing.

I don’t know if it is because it is October and the court has a lot of day of coming up that the court will be closed due to holidays and Judges out due to vacation or not, but we could only hope.  Because if this is a consistent issue, we will not likely see any improvements.

You have to keep this in mind when you are going to file a motion.  If you need an order right away, you are going to want to file a motion as soon as possible.  Today is September 30, 2013 and I was told by Van Nuys Court that they are already scheduling motions and hearing into January.

Let me give you a little reality on what this means.  Lets say you need to file a motion for child support or spousal support.  You are filing because your spouse won’t agree out of court to pay any support.

Obviously there is a need for support and you need money.  So you file your motion and you have to wait 90 days.  This is 90 days until the hearing only.  It is not like you are going to get a check from you spouse at the hearing!

Sometimes, after the hearing, the person who filed the motion will be asked to prepare an order after hearing that both parties would have to sign.  This process can add at least another month. Once you get that signed, you need to submit it to the court for the judge to sign.  Yes, you got it!  Another month indeed.

So now you are looking at almost 5 months before your request for spousal support or any order you request to take effect.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service that specializes in divorce in California.  We provide a flat fee pricing schedule to make divorce affordable.

 

How To Find My California Divorce Case Number

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

I am often asked how someone going through a California divorce can find their divorce case number.  While the case number is found on the divorce documents themselves, what if you lost them and need to get a copy.  The first thing you will need is your case number.

To keep the California divorce process slightly confidential, California does not have a way you can locate your case number online.  But the courts do make available that ability at the courthouse.  So while you can’t get that information from your home computer, you can if you go down to the court.

Some of the courthouses have a public access computer for use in the clerks office.  If this is available in your court, you are able to search by name.  When you do this you will be able to find your and your spouses name and locate your case number.

If the court does not have a public access computer, you can ask for them to look up your case number.  They will usually require that you show them identification so they know it is you looking up a case and not trying to get information on someone else.

I have had people call me who had filed for divorce in California many years ago and wanted to see if their case was still open.  They now wanted to proceed and thought their case would have been dismissed.  It is a good idea to check first.  While the rule of thumb is that the court will dismiss cases after 5 years, it does not happen all the time.

If you find that your old case is still open, it is better to continue on with that one as it will save you court fees.  If you file a new case, you will have to pay the filing fee again.