If you're wondering how to file for divorce in San Bernardino or Riverside County, this article will help point you in the right direction and provide forms and helpful information.
Rules for filing a divorce (Petition for Dissolution of Marriage) case:
If you're married and want to maintain marital status but legally separate in all other regards, you may file for legal separation. Similar to divorce, the court will issue orders regarding custody, visitation, support and award property or divide assets and debts. If your partner files a response and requests a dissolution of marriage the court will grant this.
If you're the petitioner, (or the spouse seeking the divorce), here's how to begin the process:
If you're the respondent, (or the spouse being petitioned), here's what you need to know:
Filing Your Divorce Forms with the Court
When your forms are completed you'll need to go to your local family courthouse and file them. At that time you'll most likely be filing the Petition, Summons and Declaration Under Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act if you have minor children. You'll need to pay the initial filing fee, ($435 as of this writing), unless you financially qualify to have the fee waived Form FW001. However, the court needs to approve this. Once you've received the stamped copies from the court clerk you can serve your spouse with a copy of the documents soon after leaving the courthouse.
Serving Your Spouse
Now that you've filed your documents with the court, the first thing you should do is serve your spouse with the documents as soon as reasonably possible. "Service of Process" is crucial to the court and legal process because it puts all parties on official notice as to what's going on in the case and provides an opportunity to appear.
Your spouse may have chosen to proceed pro se, without an attorney, and you should serve them directly at his or her home address. Otherwise, if your spouse has retained a divorce lawyer you would serve the papers to the attorney at their office.
If you are the petitioner you must follow service rules when serving the documents:
There's a lot to consider when filing for divorce in California, most of which is beyond the scope of this article. You may want to discuss options for your family with a therapist or counselor, and consult with a divorce lawyer in the Inland Empire if any of the following is true:
DISCLAIMER: This article does not constitute legal advice, but merely provides general legal information available through public documents on government websites. This information is not published by an attorney and this information may change from time to time, you should discuss legal matters with the best attorney for your case.
You may have just given or received a "hoverboard" for Christmas, but you should keep the receipt handy because new laws in California go effect on January 1, 2016. Here's a summary of some of the new laws:
In some cities, like New York, hoverboards have been made completely illegal due to the fact that riders can get up to 13MPH, (many average adults run about 8-9MPH). Add that with people's lack of attention and you have a recipe for disaster on a busy city sidewalk.
Do you think these new laws are useful or are they common sense? Michael Wetzel was killed December 2, 2015 in the terrorist attack in San Bernardino. What's unique about his situation is that he leaves 6 children and his wife behind this Christmas. There are a lot of organizations trying to get your donations right now, but this is a family that is local to our community and needs your help now more than ever before. Any dollar amount you donate can help BIG for a family that just lost their father, husband and sole financial provider.
Click the "Donate" button below and you can see that many people are donating as little as $10, probably less than you spent on your secret Santa. 100% of funds raised go directly to Renee Wetzel and her 6 children, please don't hesitate to click and donate small or big right now. THIS DONATION PERIOD HAS ENDED. A special thanks to the Newport Beach Firefighter’s Association who has adopted the Wetzel family as the recipient of their annual fundraising efforts for 2015. Let's face it... having to hire a lawyer sucks. That being said you need to make sure you find the best attorney that you can afford. Making matters worse is that the situation that brought you to the point that you need to hire a lawyer was most likely pretty terrible to begin with. How are you supposed to asses a quality lawyer when you may have never hired one before? It's not as easy as doing a Google search and hiring the first lawyer on page 1. If you're like most people, you have no basis to compare a good attorney from a bad one. It's not like hiring a plumber where the result of their work is either the clog is gone or it's still there. You may not even know if you hired a good attorney until years down the road when a problem or issue with your case pops up. Here's a few tips to find the best lawyer for your unique situation: Step 1: Get a Referral It sounds so 20th century doesn't it? A great way to find the best attorney is to seek a reference from your friends, colleagues or family members. Chances are good that if they did well by them, they'll probably work out well for you too. Also, when a lawyer receives a referral from a former client, (or another attorney), they usually like to make sure they "go the extra mile" because they're always building their referral network. Step 2: Research the Lawyer Whether you found the attorney through a referral or not, you still need to perform due diligence by checking what other people's experience is with that particular lawyer. InlandEmpireLawyers.com makes this process easy by assembling our attorney profiles with links to each attorney's reviews: Yelp, Martindale-Hubble and AVVO. You should consider that lawyers can sometimes piss people off, just because you found a few negative reviews you should take that with a grain of salt. I've never met a lawyer with 100% client satisfaction... even if that's what Yelp says. They'll always have a client somewhere that thinks they could've done a better job, even if it was completely out of the attorney's control. In fact, I'll suggest that if your prospective attorney hasn't made someone mad along their career path maybe they aren't the fighter you're looking for? More on this here. Step 3: Interview At Least 3 Lawyers Although this probably sounds like pulling teeth, chances are your legal problem deserves more than one opinion. You probably look at 5-10 pairs of shoes before buying, this decision should at least deserve that level of attention and scrutiny. Many attorneys offer a free initial consultation, use that valuable time to answer their questions accurately and most importantly ask your own:
Whether you're dealing with a divorce, DUI or bankruptcy you should always hire the attorney that you feel will best represent your interest in court. You may be in for a long journey or a short story, but you need to make sure that your lawyer's goals are in line with your own. If you want the matter settled quickly and your attorney wants to take it to the Supreme Court you're going to be pushing and pulling against each other.
If you find a lawyer on InlandEmpireLawyers.com please make sure to tell them that you found them here!
If you’re a consumer-based plaintiff’s attorney you’re likely already aware of the pros and cons of Yelp, maybe you love it or maybe you hate it. However, it’s undeniable that it’s probably a part of your client’s life and they're likely to use Yelp to seek reviews on everything from doctors, dentists, and restaurants to yes... even lawyers. One study suggests that Yelp is the most trusted website for attorney reviews. You can no longer ignore the power Yelp wields to the small and medium sized law firm.
Getting the Best Visibility on Yelp
There’s a few things you should do to improve your visibility and ranking on Yelp. Most of it’s obvious, but I bet there’s a couple you haven’t thought about.
What if My Law Firm Has Bad Reviews?
There’s usually no “winner” in a divorce and there’s always a criminal defense client that will think their lawyer didn’t fight the District Attorney hard enough. However, if all of your reviews have a consistent complaint then you have a problem on your hands. If your policy has changed due to complaints, let people know. Like you probably tell your clients, the worst thing you can do is ignore the problem and hope it goes away on it’s own.
Most attorneys blog for one or two reasons: 1) To position themselves as an expert on a given practice area. 2) To attract new business. But there's a fundamental problem with the method in which most attorneys execute their blogging efforts... nobody's listening. You're wasting your time yelling into a bullhorn in a stadium filled with empty seats. At least that's how it feels. Let me ask you a question, do you follow your dentist's blog? Why not? Your dentist has paid good money to a marketing company to fill his/her website with valuable information about root canals and Gingivitis, isn't that something you'd like to regularly read about? Unfortunately, to a consumer what a lawyer does every day is like getting a root canal, (hopefully it's not like that for you). Consumers looking for an attorney are similar, they'll often find your blog in a Google search that leads to your website. A HubSpot study of 7,000 B2B and B2C businesses found that:
Matthew Toren from Business.com says: "...your blog [and guest blog] is where you put your highest quality content, and you use social media, emails, and other means to share that content with your audience. In that manner, blogging is still one of the most effective tools out there for content marketing, and they should be a part of nearly every inbound marketing strategy." InlandEmpireLawyers.com would like your brain... well... not literally. We want what's in your brain. If you use our blogging platform to write intelligent and compelling legal content, we attribute your content by linking to your legal profile on InlandEmpireLawyers.com. We allow you to link to your website from your blogs which will help with your optimization effort, PLUS we'll add your picture and tagline to a practice results page (Family, Criminal, Personal Injury, Etc). How do I get a legal profile? If you're already a subscribing customer of InlandEmpireLawyers.com, thank you! You can publish and link to any page of your website today (hooray!). Shy about blogging? Kevin O'Keefe from LexBlog, (widely known as an excellent legal blogger), has published "5 Topics to Blog About", a great way to get started. If you want to learn what to avoid when blogging, Law360 published "5 Ways Law Firms Screw Up Their Blogs" Both are easy to read and to the point, I suggest you read both before publishing one more blog entry.
If you are interested in contributing blogs to InlandEmpireLawyers.com click here, we have some guidelines to follow. This service is available to LOCAL attorneys in San Bernardino & Riverside Counties only, (Cal Bar verified). *Updated Feb 17, 2017 |
IE Legal Hub
Local legal information, published by local Inland Empire lawyers. Are you a local attorney?
Archives
July 2023
Categories
All
|