California Divorce | Don’t Use Marital Settlement Agreement Format
Today, we’re talking about putting together your final agreement. This is known as your Marital Settlement Agreement in the years past.
And then a lot of people are still doing this as far as attorneys are concerned, the Marital Settlement Agreement was a lengthy drawn out narrative.
So a series of paragraph 20, 25, 30 pages long.
And the reason we’re doing this video is the courts are trying to get away from having this long narrative you know 20, 25 pages written document regarding your Settlement Agreement.
And have many years ago have gone to a forms type set up. And that’s how we process divorce cases.
We use the court forms and I want to explain why. We have a lot of people that come to us and say they already have a written agreement and they want to submit their case to the court.
And they’ll either have it done on a piece of paper or these are folks trying to do it with themselves. And it lacks the legal sufficient legal language to process through the courts.
And that’s one of the benefits of the judgment forms is they have all the required language and then it’s just a series of check boxes.
So it makes it very difficult to miss getting that legal language in because these are court, these are documents prepared by the court where you are just going through in checking boxes and filling in the blanks.
What we’re seeing is a lot of folks that are using these online type services where you get the forms complete it for you automatically that they do not meet the legal guidelines for submitting your case, your judgment to the court and they’re being rejected.
So people are paying a couple hundred bucks getting their forms done.
They’re having this written, I’m not saying these are created by a computer, and then submitting to the courts being rejected as the clerk is going through the MSA Marital Settlement Agreement, it’s missing all kind of legal language and they’re telling folks to add this, add that but they don’t do specific.
They’ll say this paragraph is missing, this such and such information per Family Code Section and you’re going to have no idea what is to go in there.
So when people come to us, we essentially will use their written narrative Marital Settlement Agreement as a guide.
But we’ll transfer that information on to the judgment forms which have all the required court information.
So if you’re trying to do your divorce case yourself, save yourself some time and frustration and use the courts judgment forms for each of your child custody orders, property orders, etc, if you have any questions about that feel free to give me a call.
We are a Full Service Divorce Paralegal Firm serving California. The number here is 661-281-0266 or you can go to Divorce661.com for more information.