Filing For Legal Separation Is Not Faster Than Divorce | Santa Clarita Divorce
Today we are talking about the differences between legal separation and divorce as far as how fast or how slow it may take to get the process completed.
I’ve been getting a lot of calls for legal separation lately, and I generally talk people out of it for couple of reasons, but today we’re going to talk about the fact that people think that legal separation is faster to have processed than is a divorce.
I want to talk to you about the real world and what really is happening when it comes to legal separation.
In a divorce, you may have heard that there is a six month cooling off period. That means from the day your spouse has served, you can’t get the divorce finalized for at least six months and a day.
With legal separation that’s not the case, so some people may think, let me do a legal separation because that’s going to be faster.
That way we can divide everything up, maybe for particular financial reasons or tax purposes or what have you.
But I want to wan you against that and this is what I’ll tell you if you call me for legal separation.
Essentially, because the courts are so impacted right now, so busy, job losses, court closures, layoffs, etc. the legal separation process is going to take just as long as the divorce process and here’s why:
While you can get the legal process done immediately, there is no cooling off period like there is with divorce. The issue is they actually getting it processed through the courts.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to do your legal separation paperwork, take it down to court, have the judge sign it, there’s no cooling off period as long as the paperwork is correct, you can have your legal separation.
For that reason, it would be faster. However, in Los Angeles County, the process of getting your judgment approved is no faster for legal separation than it is for divorce.
What’s happening right now, because of court closures, the process of getting your judgment approved is taking anywhere from six to nine months.
If you factor that in for your reason for getting a legal separation and then you plan on maybe later divorcing. There’s really no reason to file for legal separation and then later divorce, because ultimately it’s not going to be any faster than the divorce process with the courts being so slow to approve the judgments in general. Whether it’ll be divorce or legal separation.
I hope that made sense. If you have any questions about legal separation, we’re going to be doing a few videos this week on that because we’ve been getting a lot of calls.
661-281-0266. My name is Tim Blankenship.
For more information you can go at divorce661.com.
