One of the most important aspects of my business is to help divorcing couples work together. Impossible? No. It just takes a little work on everyones part.
Case in point. I received a call from new client who lives out of state. He is in the military and is stationed away from his home town state.
His wife filed for divorce and mailed the divorce documents to him. He read the summons that said he had 30 days to respond and panicked because there was only 4 days left, based upon the date of the court stamp on the forms.
He called a local attorney in Santa Clarita and paid $200 for an over the phone consultation. While he was waiting for his appointment, he was doing some more research online and found our company and gave us a call.
When he called, one of his first concerns was that he needed to respond by the 30 days. But my first issue was in how he was served. He had stated that his wife mailed the forms to him. There is a specific procedure to divorce and mailing the summons and petition does not conform to policy. The first documents served must be personally served in most cases.
Once we discussed that, i pointed out that he had more time because technically he had not been served yet.
But most importantly was to get him and his wife to work together on this as best as possible. It was apparent that they were not communicating too much which can definitely compound the problems.
So what I did was indicate that the best course of action would be to get his wife on board with having me coordinate the events of the divorce so the process can progress smoothly through the court system.
He agreed, and as of this writing, am waiting for his wife to reach out to me. We just spoke yesterday evening, so i am expecting her call today.
The goal here is to work with both spouses, to explain the process and procedure of getting divorced and keep the working together as best as possible.
At the end of the day, he was able to get a refund from the attorney for the consultation he had paid for after realizing he did not need an attorney to get divorced in his case.
