How To Prepare California Divorce Response | Santa Clarita Divorce

Hi there! Tim Blankenship, owner of SCV Legal Doc Assist, we’re a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm specializing in the divorce process.

We are licensed and bonded in the County of Los Angeles and serve all the courts in California, and we can help you regardless of your location.

If you’re looking for a paralegal type of service or a legal document preparation service to prepare your divorce forms professionally, please give us a call.

If you have not filed for divorce make sure to check out these articles and videos.

How To Prepare California Divorce Petition

How To Prepare California Divorce Summons

Now let’s talk about preparing the divorce response form. We are working on a series of how-to videos. You can find all the videos on how to prepare all the different divorce forms on our YouTube channel and on our website.

So, this article is going to discuss  how to prepare the response if you have been served with divorce paperwork. What you’re going to want to file, not necessarily, we’re not attorneys, and we can’t advise you on what to do. There are ways to proceed through the divorce without filing a response, so we’re not going to get into the when-you-should or if-you-should file a response, we are not able to discuss that as a legal document preparation service—speak to a lawyer about that.

We’re just going to go through how you would file the response paperwork if that’s what you chose to do. Let’s flip over to the response paperwork, FL-120. What we’re going to do is we’re just going to go through the form and show you how you would prepare it if you were going to do this on your own.

We’ll go step-by-step. So, you’re going to complete this if you’ve been served paperwork; this will be the response to a divorce.

So we are going to say we are John Smith, we are 123 Main Street, input your city, state and zip code. Then put your phone number in here. Fax number if you want, not necessary; phone number, definitely; the courts are going to contact you, possibly. E-mail address is optional. Here you are going to put “In Pro Per”, or you can simply say “Self Represented”, either one will work. County of Los Angeles and we’re going to use our local area code, one of the branches here at 900 and Third Street.

Then you’re going to put your name here as the petitioner; actually that’s incorrect. The petitioner, if you’re filing this response, you’re going to be the respondent.

This form is very similar to the summons, so we’re going to say here in response, dissolution of marriage, we also have some other options here but we’re just talking about dissolution of marriage. This is talking about residency, if the respondent has been a resident of the state for the last six months, or you can mark both boxes, it’s up to you.

Here you put the date of marriage, date of separation, years married and months married; this gives a tally here, a total length of time of your marriage.

Here you’ll either mark if there are no minor children, or if there are, you’re going to give the name, date of birth, age, and sex.

Separate property, we’ve discussed this in the other videos; you can indicate here your separate property. If you want to know more information about what is separate property, what is community property, we will be doing a video of that as well. For purposes of this, we do use some boiler point language in here, basically that suggests that we’re going to provide this information at a later date. If we’re preparing your divorce forms for you professionally; you don’t have to worry about that we will take care of that for you.

Page 2 is going to be your community property; again like the separate property on page 1, this is the property, and you can itemize it here, or you can use the boiler point language.

There are some things in here that we don’t normally see, it may or may not apply, but then again this is just to indicate that you’re responding, that this is the dissolution of marriage based on irreconcilable difference, where it’s going to be 99% of the time.

And here you have your requests for a particular order; so if you have children, who do you want the custody be to, if you want it to be you the respondent, and make sure you remember who you are, which part you are, since we are working on the response, you’re going to be the respondent, so if we’re talking about you and the things that you want, make sure that you check the box respondent box. Of course there’s the joint box if you want the legal custody be joint, physical custody be joint, and so forth.

These boxes in here are related to other forms that are attached to the response, that are for holiday schedules, and child custody visitation schedules, and so forth; again we will be doing videos for all those down the road.

You can ask the court to terminate to the court jurisdiction and ability to award spouse support to the other party if you like. You can ask the court to make orders for property rights. And you can ask for your name to be restored to your maiden name if you like.

Don’t forget to date it, type or print your name here, and you can sign it here, and this would be the form that you would file with the court. You also want to serve a copy on your spouse; but the important thing is that you file a copy, just don’t forget to put case number.

The case number will be on the original summons and petition that you received when you were served, so don’t forget to put the case number in here otherwise the court will have difficulty in filing this form and making sure that it’s registered under your case number, so don’t forget to put that there.

Again, I am Tim Blankenship, I’m the, owner of SCV Legal Doc Assist, a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service. We service folks looking to get through your divorce process in an affordable way; those who are not using their attorneys, representing themselves, and are mostly in agreement with the divorce process.

We’re doing a series of videos here, to help folks find this information; they can self-prepare their forms, using the forms that we’re showing you on the video.

Or give us a call and if you’d like an affordable way to get your divorce process done professionally we’d be happy to help. Thanks so much .if you have any questions please give us a call or visit one of our websites.

If you have not filed for divorce make sure to check out these articles and videos.

How To Prepare California Divorce Petition

How To Prepare California Divorce Summons