FL-180 Judgment : What Do You Write For Respondent Served Or Respondent Appeared On?
Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com, today we’re talking about the FL 180 judgment face sheet, in particular we’re talking about line item number 3 where it says the court required jurisdiction of the respondent on and then it says date and then there’s 2 choices, A says the respondent was served with process and B says the respondent appeared.
So, a couple of things I want to talk about, 1st I want to talk about what dates do you put in there. So, number one, obviously if the party was served you’re going to put the date that they were served, whether that be by personal service or notice of acknowledgment of receipt and you’re going to mark box A, the respondent was served with process and that’s the date the 6 months start essentially.
Now the other way that one can appear is by responding so if someone responded you can also use that date as the date, the court required jurisdiction over the respondent on and the reason I’m bringing this up is we recently had a client who tried to do their own divorce before they called us and they’re having trouble submitting their judgment, as is the case with most people who try and do their own divorce and what happened is the court rejected the judgment and said that he proof of service was wrong.
There was something wrong with the proof of service so, it wasn’t served right or it wasn’t filed right or there was some error on the proof of service so they rejected the proof of service.
So they called us for assistance and when I looked up the case I saw that the respondent had actually filed a response. So what I told them is what we’re going to do is instead of filing an amended proof of service and that meant tracking down the person who served is several years ago, and that was going to be very difficult or having them reserved and starting the clock all over again, it was easier just to use the date of the response even though it was a few weeks after the date of service, you can use that date of service.
So in this case it was a very easy fix, once I saw the respondent had filed a response we checked box B to say that the respondent had appeared and used that date for the jurisdiction as opposed to the date that they were actually served, so you’ll want to use one or the other, not both, you can use the earlier of the 2 if you like, if you’re trying to get your divorced finalized faster, either the date of service or the date the respondent was served, one or the other. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com, hope you’re having a great day and we’ll talk to you soon.
