Will Divorce Court Approve Our California Divorce?
This is a question I get everyday. Will the divorce court approve our California divorce. In fact I get this stated two different ways. The first way is where people ask whether or not the judge will approve their divorce agreement if they don’t divide the assets and debts evenly. The other way people ask is by saying they will just wait to hear what the judge has to say.
(We are a full service divorce firm serving all of California. Call us for help with your divorce anywhere in California)
What you should know is that if you enter into a written agreement for your divorce the court is not going to review your divorce agreement to look to see if it is a fair agreement. The court assumes that since you both agreed to the terms of your divorce and signed the marital settlement agreement or judgment that you obviously agree to it’s terms.
Therefore, the court is not going to interfere with what you and your spouse have agreed to. In fact, they are not even looking at the division of assets or debts at all. All they are making sure of is that the paperwork was prepared correctly and that all the procedural steps were followed.
A lot of people are not aware of this. They think that because California is a community property State and because California law states that all assets and debts are to be divided 50/50 that if they submit an agreement where the assets and debts are not divided 50/50 that the court may not approve it.
That is not the case. Case in point, when we submit your judgment to the court which entails all your agreements related to community property, all we are providing them with is a list of account numbers. We do not provide any values at all. So even if the court was to look at what each of you are keeping, they have no idea what the values of each of the accounts are.
This goes for the other way we are told, whereby people want say they want to see what the judge says. The only way a judge is ever going to make a decision for you is if you ask them to. And the only way to ask a judge to make a decision for you is by going to trial.
A trial is where the court decides what is fair, not you. So with our amicable divorce cases that we handle, you would not be going to court therefore the judge would not be making the decisions, you and your spouse will be.
The short story is that if your California divorce in amicable, you won’t have to go to court and you get to make all the agreements and it does not matter if the division of your assets and debts you have agreed upon are equal or not.