Many people are not aware that you can look up your Los Angeles divorce case summary online. This is a useful tool when you want to verify that certain documents have been filed with the court. I use the court’s website daily when interacting with our divorcing clients. In this video I explain where you go to find your case summary for your divorce in Los Angeles County.

One of the most frustrating things about my business is my supposed competitors. The majority of paralegal companies are not licensed and this industry is not regulated. Most people don’t know that you have to be a Legal Document Assistant in California to provide legal services. This takes a college degree, experience working with the court’s and training under an attorney.

We have this legal document assistant certification.

What is frustrating is that these unlicensed paralegal companies only marketing tool is to offer cheap discounted prices. Then what they do is forge fee waiver court forms so that the money that is supposed to be paid to the court in filing fees is pocketed by the company.

When You fill out the FL-150 for your California divorce and are self employed, you are going to fill out the FL-150 differently that you would if you were an employee. Essentially, you will not be completing the top of page 1 of the FL-150 as that is for people that are employed. Under the employer information, you can just write self employed. Make sure to fill out the rest of page 1 of the FL-150. Then on page 2 of the FL-150 you will see where it asks about business and self employment income. This is where you will indicate you are self employed or a business owner on the FL-150.

When you are going through divorce in California and have children, you are going to need to have a child custody order which is form FL-341. This is a 3 page form where you can get very specific about the custody arrangement.

Some people believe that because the child custody order goes into so much detail that they need to have a detailed child custody agreement. This is not the case. You can have a child custody agreement that simply says joint legal and joint physical custody.

You see, many of our clients don’t want a specified child custody schedule. Sometimes they don’t want the court’s involvement and sometimes they are amicable enough to figure out child custody schedules on an ongoing basis in the best interest of the children. Other times, the work schedules of the parents change so often that to have a specified child custody schedule would not make sense.

If you are a small business owner and going through a divorce, you will complete the FL-150 Income & Expense Declaration slightly differently. First, you will not state your income on page 1 where is asks for employer information, rather you will use page 2 where it talks about business income.

I have found that many small business’s don’t keep monthly records up to date. So what do you do when you need to provide evidence of your income. Well, you are going to have to create a profit and loss statement.

This could be as simple as you going through your finances and using excel to show your income, cost of goods and expenses line item’d out so that it can be determined what you net income was each month. At a minimum you will likely need to do this for at least the last few months if going through a divorce in California for anything where you need to show income such as when one spouse is asking for spousal support.

We often have clients ask us how long the divorce process takes. I always say, “As fast as you can get me the information”. When parties going through divorce in California have all their agreements in place (i.e., custody, property division, etc.) I often have their entire California divorce completed the same day.

If both parties to the divorce are available to meet at the same time, we can usually get the divorce completely done in about 2 hours.

Keep in mind that even though we may get all the divorce paperwork completed and signed, we still have about 30 days of work behind the scenes to get the case filed, served and processed with the court.