Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and this video I want to talk about a case we handled where the parties were not in agreement and 1 spouse had already filed the request in or default.
Typical divorce, 1 party files the other party will respond. Many times you have, well not many times, all the time you have 30 days to file your response. You can go beyond the 30 days, however, if you do there’s a risk that your spouse will file a request in or default, which basically kicks you out of the case. Now on this particular case we are not working with the clients yet.
They are trying to do their divorce on their own an they’re supposedly working together but the husband behind the scenes while telling his wife they are working towards an agreement, behind the scenes he was trying to finalize the divorce through a default. So while he’s telling her don’t file a response we’re going to enter a written agreement with the court behind the scenes he was trying to push through a default judgment.
So by the time she figured it out he had already filed the default basically kicking her out of the case and trying to do that behind the scenes. In fact, was even trying to file the judgment without her. So he’s telling her 1 thing, we’re going to work on an agreement and behind the scenes playing a game with the courts trying to push through the divorce judgment without her.
So what we had to do was set aside the default. So we had to file a motion to set aside the default and then ask the court to enter the response. That’s the process you go through when you want to set aside the default. I’ll say 99 percent of the time they will do that for a good reason. So what happened was we were filing the motion. We got a court date for the set aside and of course with the courts being so busy the court date was pushed out 45 to 60 days out. So this was going to give an opportunity for time to go through where the husband was still trying to push through the judgment.
Now because the courts are so busy and they may not be on the same page the judgment clerk with the actual court clerk, it’s possible that the judgment could get pushed through. So fortunately the husband did not know what he was doing and the judgment kept getting rejected but even though he knew that the set aside motion was on calendar and there’s going to be a court to ask for the default to be set aside he continued to try and file his judgment.
I think it was at least 3 times during the time we’re waiting for the hearing. He’s trying to push through this judgment as a default even though the default set aside was on calendar. Ultimately the default was set aside. He was unsuccessful in pushing through his default judgment with the court so now the case is going to trial because she wanted to have an opportunity to be heard and because he was trying to trick her into filing a default judgment that’s one of the reasons you can have the judgment set aside.
So even i guess the purpose of this video is that even if a default has been filed against you we can usually have the default set aside so you can enter the case and go to trial and be part of coming towards an agreement through the trial process.
