California Divorce Use Court Forms For Judgment Not Marital Settlement Agreement

Today we are talking about the easiest way of preparing your judgment.

And the reason I bring this up is because yesterday I had a client in my office that came in and they had this long written agreement it’s called the marital settlement agreement or settlement agreement.

And it was a long drawn out settlement agreement. And some of these you’ll find through other online services, they provide these 10 or 15 page legal documents and a lot of them are legally insufficient so we got away from using those.

And then we also have people who come in who have a written agreement were they basically took out a piece of paper and said, this is what I want to keep, this is our agreement, this is what the other parties are going to keep, and this is the agreement

And a lot of those are being rejected by the court because they need to have specific legal language in them.

You can’t just hand-write or type up an agreement, there has to be a specific language in those agreements. So what we’re doing is we’re getting away from doing those.

In fact we haven’t done them in years. Because the courts now have the court forums that you can use that already have all the legal language and all you need to do is check the check boxes that are applicable. So let me give you an example.

We are talking about the judgment, when you have a judgment you have to have the FL-180, you have the judgment form, and then you just have your attachments for the applicable fields that you have.

So for instance, if you look at the judgment on page 2 you’ll see that you have issues of child custody, child supports, spousal supports, and property.

All of those have specific order forms that you can attach to the judgment which have all the specific language already in them.

So let’s talk about if have children you attached the child custody and the child support order form, and then you just go to this forms and check the boxes that are applicable and you don’t have to worry about is the language correct because it already has the correct court language.

Again, with spousal support and with property all you have to do is check the boxes it indicates which property is community property, which property is separate property, and who’s getting what.

So this is how we do our judgment, we just use the court forms because it doesn’t leave room for chance where you’re going to make a mistake and not put the correct legal language in your documents.

So where the lady came in yesterday she had a fifteen page agreement, we turned that into five pages of just forms.

Did it in about ten minutes just checking the boxes and it was a done deal.

So there is definitely a streamline way of doing this.

Unfortunately the courts do not make this very apparent and if you are looking at forms online and software services online, they’re going to misdirect you and it’s going to end up more difficult than just hiring a service like ours from the very beginning and letting us take care of your divorce for you here in California.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com, I hope that was helpful. Please call me.

I’ll be happy to give you a free consultation and explain what we can do for you and we will be happy to help. Please go to our website on the screen here at divorce661.com for more information.