LA County Divorce Self Help Center Even Gets It Wrong
Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and I field a lot of calls, I probably get 15 to 20 calls a day, maybe 5 of which are people who end up becoming clients or will soon become clients and the other 15 are people that just had a question.
Maybe they’re trying to do their own divorce. It’s not that we provide a free service, however I am willing to spend 5 minutes on the phone with folks to help them resolve perhaps what might be a small issue, or determine if it’s a small issue or just something they can do themselves or where I’d need to step in and help them.
And today’s call was from a gal who tried to file her case in Lancaster. Trying to do it herself using the courts self help center, if there is such a thing. And her comment was how rude and how unhelpful the self help center was and I know that because I worked for the self help centers years ago and know how the clerks and everyone can be, very unfriendly and very unhelpful, but anyways she said that the courts told her that she had to start over entirely.
This was up in Lancaster and they’re renowned for being the least helpful and most unfriendly in all of [UNKNOWN] county as far as from talking to clients of who have tried to do their own divorce in the beginning. But anyways, they had told her that there was something wrong with her proof of service and her notice of acknowledgment.
I said you know what if want to hire me, don’t hire me, send me over what they’re telling you is wrong and I’ll take a look at it. So she scanned over the proof of service and notice of acknowledgment and I took a quick look. It took all of 5 seconds and there was nothing wrong with it at all. So I asked her to check with the clerk and see what it is specifically they were saying, but it appears that they were mistaken in telling her that she needs to start over because there was absolutely nothing wrong with her proof of service. So I guess the purpose of this video is number 1 to tell you the clerks aren’t perfect.
They make mistakes like everyone else. Some of them just don’t care. Other times they just make a mistake, and often times I’ll be, even if we get rejected judgments I will read their response and rationale for the rejection and I will usually have to, not argue with them but send them my rationale and the reasoning why I think it should be processed as is, and I’m usually correct.
So number 1, they’re not that helpful. Number 2, they sometimes can be wrong and in this case they were just wrong and giving wrong information, and we see that quite a bit. Even the reject sheets that they send out will have things that are incorrect on them.
They’ll say forms are missing when they’re not. They’ll say things aren’t marked when they are. They’ll say to include forms which aren’t required. So just give them the benefit of the doubt, but they are wrong often and we’ll take a look at things and fix things when people do need help.
If you have something that comes up and you just want me to take a quick look at it I don’t mind. You can always schedule a consultation with me or give me a call. I might spend 5 minutes on the phone with folks trying to square away what they’ve got going on, or answer simple questions if it is simple, otherwise we do provide a full service divorce solution, and many times our clients use us for that, but sometimes just giving them a little bit of help to help them finalize their divorce case. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.
If you have any questions just give me a call. You can schedule a consultation right off our website at divorce661.com and be happy to help you
