Today I’m going to talk to you about what to do if there are two petitions filed in your case.

Meaning, you filed for divorce, and your spouse filed for divorce, separately, several days, weeks, months apart, how to correct that; and number two, what to do if neither party has been served.

I’m going to explain the situation of the caller that I just hung up the phone with.

So here’s the situation, over a year ago, the parties had attorneys, they both filed for divorce, so they both filed a petition within days of each other, and what happened was now this is a year later, neither party was ever served the petition because they both filed petitions.

Obviously the attorneys thought that one would be considered a response, but that’s not how it works.

If you want to, if both parties file a petition, what needs to happen to correct that is you need to draw up a stipulation that says case A is going to be the lead case and case B is going to be, please consider case B as the response to case A, and then you submit that to the court, the judge would sign it, and there you have a response and that response would count as the date of service.

The other way that you can correct this, now in this particular circumstance the problem here was that a year has gone by, they’d been to court, they’d been to hearings but because no one was ever sure, because there was never a response filed in either of the cases, the courts have not retained jurisdiction over them as far as filing the judgments.

We’re talking about that six-month waiting period has not even started even though this has been going on for over a year.

So to fix this, the fastest way would be to get one of the parties served. What I’d recommend is, whoever filed the case first, take that case, have that filed on your spouse.

Fill out a proof of service. Of course you need to follow the rules of proof of service; I’ve done a video on that so you can look for that video next.

Have that person served file the proof of service with the court. That will start the six-month clock, even though years already gone by, you need to start that clock.

The next thing you need to do is complete the stipulation regarding having case B as the response to case A if you need assistance with that, I’ve done another video on that as well: How To Draw Up A Stipulation To Have The Second Case Be The Response To The First Case.

So watch out for that, make sure that the proof of service has been filed; make sure the clock has started ticking.

What’s going to happen to these folks is even though they walked into court thinking everything was ready to go to finish their case and file the judgment, they found out that literally they had to start from day one as far as the six-month clock is concerned.

My name is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com.

For more information, please give me a call, 661-281-0266.

We handle divorce cases all throughout Los Angeles County. I look forward to helping you if you need our assistance.

Talk to you soon!

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