Posted by DivorceLine in This is a question our business gets usually. How legal is online divorce? Well let me explain. When you perform your divorce online, you are not performing anything unique from acquiring a standard divorce. When acquiring a divorce the standard way, you most likely will seek the council of an attorney. That attorney will most likely explain to you that you may perhaps need to speak to your spouse to try to agree on the terms of why the two of you are obtaining a divorce. These terms will consist of but not limited to how to split property, how to diminish debts and child custody and visitation. This could possibly surprise you, but in over 80% of divorce instances, the spouses will agree on these problems. Most of the work in obtaining the two of you to agree on the terms has been carried out by you and your spouse. But the individual who advantages from these negotiations is the attorneys representing you.
The next step is the separation papers. Your attorney will take all the info gathered from the issues the two of you agreed upon and put them in a form that the judge in your case will be able to procedure. Most attorneys will charge you anywhere from $300 – $2500 just for these papers alone. This fee does not consist of your attorney filing your divorce or representing you in court. This fee ONLY is for the Separation Agreement. You have now spent cash on retaining your attorney for them to tell you to try to work out the terms out on your own. After you have completed that, you are now faced with a fee to have them put into writing the issues the two of you have agreed upon.
Then there is filing of your divorce with the county clerk. This is yet another fee that you will pay your attorney to perform. This is normally yet another $400 – $1000. Being that attorneys are in court buildings all day anyway, they normally do the filing whilst they are there, but most of them mail, fax or electronically procedure this paperwork which takes them about 15 minutes at most.
Finally your attorney will represent you in court. Being that you and your spouse have already agreed on every thing, the judge often asks you all the needed questions. You attorney’s job is regularly just to introduce himself, you and your case to the judge. After a series of questions directly to you from the judge, your case will be finalized. The fee for your attorney to perform this will most likely price you many hundreds to many thousands of money.
Now to answer the question on if online divorce is legal…
Do you have to have an attorney to assist you come to an agreement with your spouse? Most likely not. With online divorce, you already have an concept of how you have to have to split property, debts and child custody. You won’t have an attorney charging you a fee to tell you that you require to agree on some issues. What an online divorce company will do is prepare the Separation Agreement for you after you have already agreed to the terms. This agreement is regularly included with most online divorce services. There even some that provide a free of charge Separation Agreement. All you would have to do is sign and have your spouse sign and get notarized.
Now on to obtaining your papers filed with the county clerk. The filing for divorce in most counties is under $150. This means you will have to take an hour or so out of your day and head down to your local county clerk and fill out a one page sheet pay your filing fee and file your own paperwork. If it sounds greater to pay your attorney $400-$1000 to do this, then that is fine too. Most of us do not need to throw hundreds of money away on this procedure.
Now the final step is the court appearance. Do you definitely need to have an attorney sitting next to you whilst you answer uncomplicated questions from the judge such as:
When had been you married?
How lengthy have you been separated?
Do you agree with the terms of this Separation Agreement that I am reading?
Most likely not. But for those that believe that online divorce is not legal, all you are performing is eliminating the attorney. You still will need to file for divorce and do all the issues that an attorney would do. You will just be performing all the legwork for yourself. Your divorce forms will be the exact same as the forms you will get from your attorney. The thing that will actually bake your noodle is that the online divorce providers use the identical personal computer programs most attorneys use to draft all your forms.
Hopefully this eliminates your skepticism on the legalism of online divorce. You can generally visit 95DollarDivorce.com for additional details on how the online divorce procedure works.
