Issues You May Have When Self Completing Divorce Forms | Santa Clarita

I have been getting a lot of people calling me because they have attempted to complete their own divorce or used some black market paralegal service to help them complete their divorce only to find out it was done completely wrong.

The client had used LegalZoom to prepare all the documents.  The way LegalZoom works is you fill out a questionnaire and then the program automatically fills in the divorce forms.

Because you are not paying for any type of assistance regarding filing or how the process works, you are on your own in that regard.  You got what you paid for.  The forms completed and nothing else. Why do you think it is so cheap?

The problem here, is that the automated forms that they complete leave some blanks for you to complete.  If you don’t know (and how would you?) that there is more to complete on some of the forms, they will be wrong.

As I have mentioned countless times, it is not up to the court clerk to verify you have completed the divorce forms correctly.  It is not their job.  They will simply stamp your forms, even if they know they are wrong.

Case in point.  The forms this client filed using Legal Zoom were all wrong.  They were either missing the dates of service (very important) or missing the box they were supposed to check saying what form had been served.  But for the laymen, the form looks complete.

So I pointed out all the issues with the forms this client had filed.  What we have to do know is correct everything she has done .  Starting over would be easier, but since the forms were already filed, we will have to file amended forms of everything.

The sad part about this is that this client had already paid LegalZoom for the forms.  LegalZoom did not rip her off, she got exactly what she paid for.  She got document preparation and nothing more.

When you use our divorce document preparation you get full support, we complete all the forms, file all the forms and advise you of court procedure.  We are a full service divorce document preparation service that will take care of everything so you don’t have to go  through what this client did.