Our office has helped thousands of people successfully get their Divorce judgment here in San Diego, CA. The following are the main steps we follow in achieving this success.

Petition: This is the stage that initiates your process, get your case to the court system. Once you fill out the workbook, we prepare the petition based on the information you provided. For this very reason, it is important that the information you provide is accurate. When your petition is ready to sign, you will be getting a phone call/e-mail from our office to schedule an appointment for you to come and sign. Note that, here, it is the petitioner who signs(unless it is a Summary Divorce), the other party/the respondent does not sign the petition. We may also ask you to fill out financial disclosure forms. These particular forms are exchanged between you and the respondent, they do not get filed with the court. The court just wants you to disclose any assets or debts you have or lack thereof to the other party and vice-versa. After you sign the petition, we take the petition to the court. The petition gets filed, and once we have it back, we are ready for the next step.

Service: This is the second step. Here, we have received the petition from the court and we are ready to serve your spouse/respondent. What do we serve? The filed petition, response forms, and financial disclosure forms that you completed in step one. We also include a form known as “receipt of acknowledgment”. This is the form where the respondent would date, sign and mail back to our office in our stamped self addressed envelope. Your spouse can be served either by mail or personal service. We currently do not provide service processor services. Here, in this step, there is a 30 day window period where if the respondent decides to file a response, she/he can do so. Because of this Mandatory 30 day waiting period, we can not proceed to the next step without completing the waiting period. This includes even If the respondent signs the receipt of acknowledgement before the expiration date (30 days). We encourage our clients to let their spouses know that Divorce papers are on their way and that they should expect them in 5-10 business days. If you are filling in SD county, an automatic hearing date will be issued. They are primarily issued to check the status of your case (please contact our office for more information on this). In this stage, we will need information regarding your assets and debts (both community and separate). This information needs to be submitted before step 3.

Marital Settlement Agreement (MSA) and Judgment package: This is the final step. Here, based on the information you provide us in step 2, we prepare your settlement agreement. This document will address issues such as your community property division, pension plan, child custody matters (if minor children are involved), taxes..etc. We will also prepare the judgment package. You will need to come to our office to sign and notarize the final documents. Once we have everything ready, we will submit it to the court.

After this stage, we just have to wait for the judge to render the judgment and dissolve the marriage. This could take several months depending on the workload at the court. Once the judgment is finalized and mailed to us, we will contact you to let you know and set a day/time for you to pick up the copy of your judgment from our office.

Questions or need help with your divorce? Contact us!

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 760-754-9059