How To File Divorce Papers By Mail | Santa Clarita Divorce

Hi! This is Tim Blankenship, owner of SCV Legal doc Assist. We’re a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service, specializing in divorce.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to file papers by mail with the courts.

The courts are very good, believe or not, about accepting your fillings by mail. So if you’re not near your local family law branch, for instance, we’re located at Santa Clarita and the Santa Clarita Valley does not have a law court, believe it or not, as big as we are.

So our closest court would be the San Fernando branch and personally, I don’t like driving down to San Fernando if I don’t have to, I do on occasion to volunteer and so forth. But for the most part, I mail file all of my documents.

So if you’re working with us, you can expect that all of the forms that I file would be by mail. Unless I have a whole bunch of new cases to go down there and file, I will, but other than that, I like to mail my documents in.

So, in this article, I wanted to show you how you are going to go about doing that. Now it’s not going to be much different that if you were to file your papers by driving down there. But the way that gas cost these days, you can put a 44 cents stamp on it and think you’re going to be better off.

When you want to file by mail, let’s talk about filing your initial divorce paperwork.

Let’s say, you just want to start your divorce case and you haven’t filed anything, you don’t have a case number or anything. So, what you’re going to want to do is get your summon and your petition and all the forms you need to file for divorce.

You’re going to hole punch them, staple them and make copies (you want to mail down 2 copies of every form). What you’ll do is you’ll take, say your summons, hole punch it and this would be your original. You’re going to sign it and you’re going to make 2 copies. You’re going to take those, the copies of everything.

You’re going to have your summons in two copies, your petitions in 2 copies and any other form that’s required by your court. You’re going to do the original, hole punched, and then you’re going to have 2 copies. You’re going to mail that to the court.

Now, the court is going to get that. We’re talking to government officials, so let’s make sure we tell them what we want them to do. I always send a cover letter down with anything I file, even if it’s a proof of service, I send a letter;

I just write a letter and say:

To: Clerk of The Court, Please find the enclosed documents, if it’s a new case, please find a new case for a family law filing. Enclosed you’ll find the following documents: summons, petition (and anything else you’re sending them and then ask them to please send you a conformed copy of the filing in the self-addressed stamped envelope).

So what that means is yes, you’re going to need to send a self-addressed stamped envelope, if you expect to get anything else and know that you’ve sent them back in the court. They’re not going to mail it to you otherwise, you’ll have to go down and pick it up.

So make sure you send down, with your cover letter and all you originals and copies, a self-addressed stamped envelope with sufficient postage for the items you’re going to mail back.

Now remember, you’re going to have copies of up to 5 forms, you have 2 copies coming back to you, so you may want to weigh those or just throw in a bunch of stamps to make sure you’re going to get those back because it’s really important that you want to make sure you get your filing back because once you send a new case down there, a good luck having them located if you don’t get your copies back.

You can file your papers by mail and this includes, again, like we just discussed, your entire new case or if you have proof of service or anything else you serve, just make sure you send a cover letter, the original which is hole punched, copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ve never had a problem filing divorce cases or getting copies of filed documents that I’m filing with them and getting copies back from the court.

Again, this is Tim Blankenship. I’m a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service. I specialize only on divorce.

We are centrally located in Santa Clarita, California. We can help you anywhere across Los Angeles and California, please give me a call (661-281-0266) or you can find us at divorce661.com.