Hi. Tim Blankenship up here with Divorce661.com and in this video were talking about, what should you do when filing for divorce when one of the spouses lives out of country.

It happens more than you think. So if this is you, it is something that happens quite a bit. If you are amicable what we recommend is that you have the person, the spouse out of country be the filing party.

And here’s why, if you do a default with agreement divorce then that divorce case needs to be notarized and that usually only applies to the respondent. So if you have the out-of-country spouse file, they do not need to get their documents notarized which is good because the only notary the court would allow is from the consulate which can be a pain in the butt to get. So have the filing party be the party out of country. Tim Blankenship, Divorce661.com

We get asked all the time by a potential clients and people looking to file for divorce where they would file their divorce case.

Many people think that they need to file their divorce case in the county or state or country that they are married in. That is incorrect. You will file your divorce in the county You live in and generally at the closest courthouse in the county to you.

You can generally find this on the internet, you know, just to Google for your local Family Law Court House. But you File where you are currently living, either you or your spouse, neither have you don’t have to both live in the same county?

So, if one of you lives in Los Angeles, County, and the other lives in San Bernardino County, you have a choice of where you can file your case. In either County would be totally fine.

If you finish your divorce and you’re looking to modify the terms of your divorce ,some part of the agreement and you and your spouse agree to these changes, you can avoid Court by filing. A modification of your judgment.

We do maybe 10 or 15 of these per month. We have either past clients calling or in many cases clients that were not of ours who went through divorce years ago and they want to modify some terms of their divorce agreement.

This is simply done through a modification. It’s a stipulation that we draft and we simply State what the changes are and you guys sign it. We file it. There’s a small Court fee and then you are done. There’s no court appearance. You don’t have to battle it out in court. You don’t have to talk to a judge. You just sign the stipulation, the agreement that modifies your judgment and you’re good to go.

Tim Blankenship with Divorce661.com and today, we’re talking about hiring an attorney to be your mediator.

If you’re going to hire an attorney to be your mediator, you need to make sure that when you first contact them you let them know you’re contacting them for mediation and that you want them to work with your spouse as well.

If you go and meet with an attorney and have a consultation and they speak with you one-on-one, generally speaking, they will not be then able to be your mediator because they’ve had a personal consultation with you. This causes a conflict for the attorney.

And so, if you’re going to hire an attorney for a period for a mediation, make sure you contact them together, you meet with them together and you make it clear to the attorney that you want them to be the mediator for both you and your spouse.

Legal separation versus divorce. We get this question asked all the time. What is the difference? From a procedural Standpoint with the courts? It is the exact same paperwork, exact same process.

Divorce and legal separation ,They follow the same path. Same forms. Everything’s the same. All the decisions are the same that have to be made.

Custody support property division, everything is identically the same. The biggest difference obviously is when you conclude a legal separation case, you are still legally married. And the other issue is there’s no six month waiting period as there is for divorce.

So technically a legal separation case can be completed much quicker. There is no cooling-off period as there is with the divorce

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and this week we’ve been talking about legal separation filings, divorce filings and the difference in the two.

And what I want to address with this video is when you have a legal separation case that you concluded and then you later want to file for divorce you need to file a new divorce case entirely, completely new and you do not have to address any of the old issues uh custody or support or property division or anything like that.

But if you do want to change something you would not file anything related to that on the divorce side of things you would need to file an amendment to your legal separation case so your petition for divorce will just be to change the status, you’re just doing the divorce itself no issues are being addressed and if you have if you do want to change something 10 years 5 years later after you did the legal separation case you would do that through the legal separation case through doing a stipulation to modify the judgment.

Hi, Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com and what we’re talking about today is uh we were reached out by a client a potential client i should say that said they had one-upped us, they had watched a video where I had talked about handling old divorce cases.

In this particular video from several years ago i believe we said that the case was 17 years old when the parties realized their divorce was not finalized and in today the gal that reached out to us their case was filed in the 70s and she said it was over 49 years old so definitely a record but i haven’t talked about this in a couple of years so i thought i’d take this opportunity to discuss finalizing old cases which generally is possible.

But I want to talk about some of the potential issues one obviously in a case where it’s almost 50 years old it would be locating you know the other party having no contact both parties believing the divorce has been done all this time to realize it hasn’t finding the other party is going to be an issue obviously number two is in regards to being able to finalize usually the court will only allow you five years to finish your divorce and if you don’t they technically by law can dismiss the case but they generally do not dismiss the case just because they’re not they don’t have a system whereby they can you know they get flagged when the case gets five years old and they go to dismiss it.

What happens is when you go to finalize the divorce 20 30 or 50 years later once it kind of gets reactivated and they see you trying to work on that case again in the form of usually submitting the judgment that’s when they’ll say oh sorry cases you know five years old or older and they just unilaterally dismiss the case and you have to start from scratch there is a workaround for that there is a stipulation that can be drafted to indicate that the parties agree to basically continue and prosecute the case beyond the five-year limit.

There’s some language that we put together and we’ve done that successfully many times there’s a lot of bad information out there about old cases if it is active and open we usually can finish the case we’ve heard people say they’ve talked to other paralegal firms and they’ve been told all kinds of weird things like cancel the case dismiss it file a new case and there’s no reason to do that.

if the case is open if there’s issues with the documents they can be amended this one particular case they had filed a petition and a response so they paid both sides of the court fee and the they’re being told to have you know dismiss the case and file again and then they’d have to pay another set of court fees so just makes no sense generally these cases can be corrected Tim Blankenship divorce661.com hope you’re having a great day talk to you soon