Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. This is episode 2 of what we’re calling judgment reviews.

This is what I do for a living, for those folks who don’t choose to hire our service from the get go, those folks of you who try to do their divorce on your own, I want to create these videos for you. Let me get this into frame here. And show you what I deal with when folks do their own divorce and then turn in their judgment and they will get a reject sheet, 9 times out of 10 and you’ll get this multiple times.

I just wanted to go over this reject sheet with you and I don’t know what’s going on here. There we go, alright just a little bit here okay there we go. So, what we’re looking at here is a reject sheet from someone who tried to do their own divorce, and this is pretty typical you’ll get between a 1 and 3 page list of rejections.

Sometimes they will populate these so all appears on one page and you’ll see another type of videos it’s a 3 page form and they just mark the appropriate box, this is more of a condense one. So, let’s talk about why this particular case was rejected and what was needed to happen in order to correct it. So, start here right at the top, so number 1, so it says submit judicial form counsel FL 130 appearance, stipulation and waivers signed by both parties.

So, this is what’s considered an uncontested case, they both parties were participating and I believe a response was filed, I’ll have to see as we go down here. Yeah, a respond and appeared, so there was a response filed in this case, so this is going to be more along the lines of an uncontested case, there’s only certain forms are needed if it’s a hybrid, judgment or a default or an uncontested case there’s going to be slightly different forms.

So, when it’s uncontested you will need to prepare an FL 130 it’s an appearance stipulation and waivers and it’s signed by both parties. Basically, because you’re not going to trial and you’re in agreement you’re basically waiving your final declaration of disclosures essentially.

Alright, judicial counsel form FL 141, in any case where the parties are both participating whether it be uncontested or whether it be a hybrid, a default with agreement, you both need to complete this FL 141, it’s your declaration recurring service of declaration of disclosure and income and expense declaration.

You can see here it says must be submitted by the petitioner as to the preliminary declaration of disclosure. And same with respondent, has to be completed by the respondent as well. See it says here must be submitted by the practitioner and the respondent as to the final declaration of disclosure, okay this is the waiver the 144 here, the judicial council form 144.

So, what they’re saying is in regards to the FL 141 the preliminary disclosures are mandatory but you can waive the final declaration disclosure which is form FL 144, you don’t need to do the disclosure twice if you guys are in agreement and your case was handled relatively quickly.

Okay FL 170, excuse me, must be submitted by the petitioner, this is a form, they don’t care what type of case you have whether it be default with agreement, default without agreement or uncontested case you need an FL 170 it’s a three page form. It’s submitted by petitioner and only signed by the petitioner. Judicial counsel form FL 180, so this is the over sheet to your judgment or your settlement agreement.

You’re always going to have an FL 180. This says submit with all original signatures and three complete copies, so the FL 180 cover sheet is the top form that will be part of your settlement agreement, whether you’re using a narrative MSA or you’re using the forms that we recommend.

Okay enter the correct jurisdiction date, so when you file, when you prepare your judgment and you prepare your FL 180, there’s a form on there that says court required jurisdiction over the respondent on and you have two options either the date they were served, as you can see here the court notified them that hey this is the date of service for or the date that they file their response which also means appeared. You can use the earlier of the dates, it just depends on you if your trying to get your divorce done quickly.

And with our cases we don’t have the respondent respond purposely just to save on court fees. So generally speaking we’re always using the service date, which will generally be the sooner of the two dates.

All right, says this judgment contains provisions for child support, so whenever there is child support you need to have the copy of the FL 192, notice of rights and responsibilities. There’s nothing to fill out on there, it’s an already completed form but it’s just a noticeability of rights and responsibilities regarding minor children and this will actually be the second form, 2 page form behind the FL 180 in your stacking order.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about just Google stacking order for California divorce papers, I’ve done a video on what order your papers go in. But you’ll have your FL 180 and if you have minor children, you’re going to have your FL 192 directly behind it. Next thing we have here, is child custody,

visitation or relax to findings means attached to every copy [UNKNOWN] from 341. Okay so, when there’s children you have to have a child custody order and a child support order. Even if you’re not going to have child support or going to request child support you still have to have the order in there.

You have to have all the appropriate court orders in there so they can make, they can establish what it is your trying to accomplish as far as your child support orders. Plus, the forms have all the necessary language that you’re going to need in getting your judgment submitted.

The judgment fails to acknowledge the courts jurisdiction of child support, again this takes care of when you use the forms FL 341, that’s going to handle the courts jurisdiction because there’s literally a box that you just check. And lastly, FL 190, this is notice of entered judgment, this form is required. There’s no signature on it, but it basically it just says that the judgment has been entered with the court.

When your divorce is all done, you’re going to get 2 things back, you’re going to get your FL 180 with the MSA settlement agreement, or judgment forms behind it. And you’re going to get the FL 190, and this form lets you know yes, your judgment is final cause here’s your FL 180 and it’s been entered with the court and these are the two forms you’ll get back when your divorce is finalized.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com, hope you enjoyed this second episode of judgment reviews and maybe you learned something from this and correcting your own judgments.

If you have any questions we do provide a full service divorce solution to anywhere in California again you can go to divorce661.com or schedule a consultation with us at 6612810266. And take care, it’s a

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And today I’m talking more about security with documents with your court documents. There’s a lot of questions people ask me about divorce, but you know what people never ask me? They never ask me what happens with all the paperwork once we’re done or even during the process.

What I’m referring to, we go through several drafts of paperwork for folks when we’re doing their divorce. So, I’ll be printing and scanning and sending copies of things to folks and when there are changes to be made or errors made or things that are corrected of course there is trash and there is waste, and there are documents that need to be shredded.

So aside from just asking how much does it cost, how long does it take, if you’re talking to a paralegal company or even a law firm, one of the questions you should ask is what happens to my paperwork after we’re done?

This is what we do. We have 2 or 3 bins that are delivered by one of the waste disposal companies, I think it’s Iron Horse, Iron something I forget what it’s called. But we have 2 bins in our reception area, once we’re done if I have documents that need to be shredded I take them at least once a month and put them in the shredder bin so they can be destroyed properly.

Also, the entire file once your divorce is done, any hard copy file is also put in the shredder. So, everything is literally gone, when you are done with your divorce with us, we don’t have any type of copies of anything of yours that could be taken that could be used to steal your identity that could be used to claim your social security number.

Remember we’re talking about court forms, they have a list of property, assets, debts, a lot of personal information, social security numbers in some cases, driver’s licenses numbers, your children’s names and date of birth, everything you need to have your identity stolen is in these documents.

So, you’re going to want to make sure to ask, what do you do, if you’re not using my company obviously we’re shredding our documents. But if your talking to someone else instead of saying hey, I’m looking for the cheapest price, or whatever it is, however you shop for someone to handle your divorce, ask what happens to your paperwork before once your case is finalized to make sure that your documents are being shredded as opposed to just being thrown in the regular trash.

Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com specializing in California divorce. Give me a call if you have any questions, be happy to

Process & Timeframes To Know During California Divorce

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this video and podcast I wanted to discuss the time frames that you can look forward too as far as going through a divorce in California.

Okay so step one you file for divorce. That’s the initial paperwork, won’t get into exactly what those are there’s another video for that. You file your divorce case, once the case is filed. The other party needs to be served.

For service, you can either hire a process server, or what we do in many cases or most of the time I should say is we have the other party sign what’s called a notice of acknowledgment of receipt. This will serve in lieu of the person being served by process server and can be used to file with the court to indicate that they have received a copy.

From the date that person the other party is served either by process server or by signed and dated that notice of acknowledgment that’s what starts the clock on the whole 6 month cooling off period in California. So, a couple things with the dates.

The date that that notice of acknowledgment is signed starts the clock on that 6 months so what that means, as soon as your divorce can be finalized is 6 months and a day after that date of service. Keep in mind you can submit your paperwork to the court, a lot of people are confused. You don’t have to wait 6 months to turn in your agreement.

You can turn them in as soon as 30 days from the date of service. So, if you are in agreement with your spouse, you file the case, they’re served, that starts the clock on the 6 months and it also starts the clock on when you can turn in your judgment, 30 days after date of service. So, 30 days after date of service we can turn in all your paperwork, 6 months is when your divorce will be finalized.

And that doesn’t matter even if you turn in your paperwork 30 day after service you may get your paperwork back from the court in a few months as far as there processing your final paperwork. But the 6 month date will appear on your final paperwork when you get it in the mail.

Keep in mind that they 6 months is just the soonest your divorce can be finalized. And the court will process your divorce faster if they get to it with right now their time frame for judgment processing is 3 to 4 months. They’re extremely backed logged.

So, hope that helps as far as time frames when it comes from going through the divorce process. My name is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. If you have any questions please feel free to call me 661-281-0266 or go to Divorce661.com for more information.

Why California Divorce Judgments Are Hard To Get Approved

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this video is about why it’s so difficult to get your divorce judgment approved through the courts. So normally when you do your divorce paperwork, you do your summons petition, your disclosures, all your paperwork, 1st when you go to court and you file those documents, the courts take your money, they file your form and you just assume everything’s fine.

Honestly the first time anyone actually looks at your paperwork and reviews it is when you turn in your judgment, and what you normally get when you turn in your judgment is the clerk will review it and after a few months of processes you’ll generally get your case back with a reject letter.

That’s what happens with half my clients that come in, come in as new clients where they haven’t started their case, and the other half of my clients come in and have had their divorce rejected numerous times, as many as 6 times in some cases. So generally, what would happen and I’m gonna put this up so you can see it, you’ll get a reject sheet which will have a list of items that you will need to fix. It will tell you what’s wrong, but it doesn’t tell you how to fix it necessarily so that’s the difficulty.

You’ll get a list of errors but they will not tell you what the corrections are. In fact, they will tell you that they are not allowed to tell you, and in some cases now I’ve been doing this for 6 years, I worked for the courts in the past, I worked for a law firm and I’ve never seen a reject sheet like this one. This one basically says, please be advised that the court will not assist in the preparation of your paperwork.

Your judgment contains multiple errors and or lacks mandatory forms. Please seek legal advice blah, blah, blah. So the funny thing is this, either the clerk was so lazy that they didn’t want to go through and check off what the issues were, or there was so many issues that they just gave it a blanket statement because it was so messed up. Now these folks actually hired me and I corrected everything.

Yes it was a mess and yes the clerk was right, there’s a lot of missing things, and a lot of things were just completely wrong. But it was quite lazy of the clerk to not even list what the issues are because as you can see in the other one I showed you, they marked off probably 12 issues, so they went through it fairly thoroughly and checked off the issues that they had.

Again you get a reject sheet that tells you what the problems are but not necessarily how to fix it. Where this one just said yours is so messed up, I’m not even going to waste my time fixing it. So we took care of that anyways but wanted to let you know no one’s reviewing your paperwork until you’re turning in your judgments.

You can anticipate getting a reject sheet at least once when you turn in your divorce paperwork. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope this video was helpful and if you need help with your divorce give me a call. You can reach me at 6612810266 or just go to divorce661.com and you can schedule and I’ll talk to you soon.

California Divorce Default Set Aside Process & Reasons

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and the purpose of this video is to explain the process of setting aside a default. So let me set up the scenario real quick. So one of the spouses filed for divorce, 30 days went by and could have been 30 days or a year and the default was filed.

This is when the response is not filed. The petitioner will file a request and or default which basically pushes the respondent out of the case and can no longer file a response or participate. At least that’s what it does in theory and practicality. However, there is a way to get around this, so if a default is filed against you, you can file what’s called a request to set aside the default.

There’s a couple reasons you need to know about in order to do that. You have to file a motion with the court. It’s a request for order for methol 300 and you also need to file your response. So this is how this plays out. The defaults been filed, you want to file the response, you now want to participate or whatever happened has changed and now you want to be a part of the case but you can’t file the response because the defaults been entered.

You file a motion with the court to request the judge to set aside the default. You file the motion and you also file the response at the same time. So what you’re asking the court to do is to set aside the default and to file the response at the same time. This does require a hearing. You have to file a motion. Get a court date, serve the other party and then appear at the hearing and explain to the judge why you think it should be set aside.

Again, there are I believe 4 reasons why you can set aside a default. Just off the top of my head one is a surprise, meaning you weren’t aware that it was going to happen or it could happen, and there are some other reasons. You have to generally within 6 months of the default being filed so you can’t wait 2 years and say oh now I want to be a part of the case and want to set aside the default, but those are the rules.

You have to file a motion, get a court date, you have to file your response at the same time and generally what they’ll do is they’ll hold the response until the judge sets aside the default and there is reason why I did this video today is because we just did a request to set aside default, file the motion, submitted the response with the filing fee check of 435 dollars and I told the client the courts will hold that until the judge approves the set aside in order to file the response because the court and the clerk cannot file the response if the defaults been entered.

So the fact that in this case the response was filed I think was a mistake on the clerk’s part because generally speaking, unless they’ve changed policies, which they couldn’t have because the response couldn’t have been filed as I speak about this as I’m speaking. The clerk could not have filed the response with the default being filed so, in this case I believe the clerk did make an error, but generally what will happen is you file your motion, right now it’s a 90 dollar fee.

You attach your 435 dollar check to the response and they’ll hold it until the time of the hearing and at that time if the judge decides to set aside the default then they’ll file the response at that time. Tim Blankenship, divorce 661.com if you need any assistance with your divorce anywhere in California feel free to give me a call 6612810266, or you can always schedule a consultation right on our website at divorce661.com. Have a great day.

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

FL-180 : Number Of Pages On California Divorce Judgment Required

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com with today’s divorce 661 tip of the day. Now this is going to be a pretty straight forward one, but it is a reason that your judgment will get rejected none the less and it happens quite a bit.

So when you turn in your final judgment paperwork the cover sheet is a FL 180. It says judgment. On page 2 there’s a little line that says number of pages attached. What you need to do is count every page following that 2nd page of the judgment and write that number down. Honestly, people forget it and the court will reject your judgment if you do not put the number of pages that follow.

The court will not count it and fill it in for you. They will straight out reject your judgment and send it back to you for the tissue alone. So make sure you include the pages.

Obviously it’s important because if you have, say there’s 10 pages and when they get it there’s actually 12 the courts going to assume that pages were added after the fact, or if you have the wrong number or no number at all as far as number of pages the courts going to assume, they need to know how many pages that they are reviewing and verifying.

So don’t forget to add the number of pages to prevent your judgment from being rejected. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com. Thanks for watching.