This is as much a rant as it is instructional and conversational about divorce and divorce procedure in California. This discussion is about when you file for divorce and how to serve your spouse in the most amicable way possible.
When going through divorce in California, you don’t have to personally serve your spouse. When clients hire our firm, we want to make sure that your divorce case remains amicable. To this end, we make sure we never have your spouse personally served the divorce papers. I don’t care how amicable you think you and your spouse are, have a process server slap some divorce papers in their face at work or home and I can guarantee you are going to hear about it.
But what i don’t understand is that I have a few divorce cases right now, where the parties hired me to help them with their California divorce and after we have the case filed, we sent the notice of acknowledgment of receipt to the other spouse and they refuse to sign it.
I feel that it is not so much that they don’t want to cooperate, rather that they feel that by signing this form they are agreeing to the divorce when they maybe not really want it. It seems that they think that if they are “personally served” divorce papers, that, even though they agree to getting a divorce, they feel that by not signing this form, that they will feel as if their spouse divorce them and that it was not what they wanted.
Just know this. While I don’t understand your decision to not sign the FL-117, I do understand that there are principles that you feel you are following and that nobody else might understand. But also understand this. If you don’t sign this form, you force the other party to serve the divorce papers to you personally which may come at a time not convenient and that might be embarassing.
Either way, you will have to be served and I don’t find any good reason why someone would prefer to be served divorce papers personally when they can just sign a form saying they got a copy.
Just my two sense and nothing more…
