After you’ve found a good family law attorney to help you through your divorce, your attorney will help you navigate through the divorce process.
The First Stage of the Divorce Process: Filing Summons & Petition for Divorce
The first stage of divorce is filing forms with the courthouse called Summons and Petition for Divorce. Petition and Summons are fairly simple boilerplate documents. These documents are available online on the Washington courts web site under family law forms.
Once the Petition and Summons forms are filed, they must be served to your spouse. You either need to hire a process server or ask your spouse to accept service informally, by email or mail. Note that you cannot formally serve these documents yourself.
If you’re in King County, the court will issue a case schedule, which will set your trial date. Your trial date will be approximately one year from the date of filing. Your case schedule will also outline the various deadlines in your case would you have to meet.
The Second Stage of the Divorce Process: Temporary Orders
So what do you do in the interim if you need to address items like child support or a parenting plan right away? This brings you to stage 2 of your divorce: temporary orders. We call him temporary orders because they only last until the divorce is finalized and the final orders are entered. So during the temporary order stage, you can file a motion with the court asking for a number of things.
You can ask the court to award you possession of the family home and order the other spouse to move out.
You can ask the court to determine child support.
You can ask the court to come up with you can ask the court to adopt your proposed temporary parenting plan.
You can ask the court for maintenance or for an award of attorney fees if you cannot help your own fees.
Once you file this motion you will have a hearing. And after the hearing, the orders will be entered. Alternatively, you and your spouse can also try to agree on temporary orders – and this actually happens quite often.
The Third Stage of the Divorce Process
The third stage of the divorce process usually involves Discovery. Discovery is where you and your attorney collect the information necessary to eventually with the final orders or finalize your divorce. This could involve either informal document collection where the spouses simply exchanged what is necessary, or this could involve formal Discovery requests, which are more time consuming but also there are more thorough and are signed under oath. The Discovery stage may also involve depositions, where you or your spouse or other witnesses will testify under oath.
The Fourth Stage of the Divorce Process: Mediation
Once that is done, the next stage is to try and settle your case. It is common for most divorces to settle in mediation. And mediation involves taking your case to a neutral third-party professional who has no interest in the outcome and they're usually very good at what they do and they get paid and they try to shuttle between you and your spouse and bring the case to settlement. Currently, because of COVID-19 it is common for mediators to perform mediations via video conferences such as Zoom or Skype. These virtual mediations have been fairly effective as I’ve worked with my own clients.
For an in-person mediation, you and your attorney will be in one room and your spouse with their attorney will be in the other room in the mediator will shuttle back and forth and try to help you settle the case.
If the case settles in mediation, then the next stage is to draft and file final orders. Once final orders have been filed with the court, your divorce will be final.
The Fifth Stage of the Divorce Process: Trial
If your case doesn't settle during mediation, it must be taken to trial because that's the only other way to get your divorce finalized. Trial preparation and trial itself involve a lot of work. There will be additional exchanges of information, especially financial information.
Your attorney will prepare you and other witnesses for live oral testimony. Finally, you do end up having a trial. Trials in family law are in front of a judge. No jury will be present. Depending on the complexity of your case, your trial can last from 3 days to 3 weeks in some extreme cases.
If you’re in Seattle, Washington or surrounding areas and would like to speak to an attorney, give us a call or send us an email.