Submission to the Legal System: the Final Divorce Steps

The divorce steps involve both preliminary and final steps. Once you or your lawyer submits the paperwork into the legal system you are entering the final phase of the divorce steps. For those who have never divorced or known anyone personally who has gone through it, the process may seem overwhelming. There is a substantial amount of paperwork and time involved from the time you fill out the application until you receive your final decree. The amount of time that elapses will depend on how busy the court's docket is and how many issues surround your individual case.
Many people are of the misconception that once the papers are filed in court they will soon have their divorce. While there are certainly exceptions, in most cases you can expect a wait of at least two months from the time the paperwork arrives in the court's hands until the time you have to appear in court. If you are filing under no-fault divorce laws, you may still have to wait another six months or more before the court will issue the final decree. While submission to the legal system is the final of the divorce steps, it is also the most time-consuming. Do not be one of those people who becomes frustrated because you think as soon as you go into court you will walk away a free man or woman—it will not happen that fast.
There are different things that may prevent your lawyer from following the final phase of the divorce steps by submitting your paperwork into the legal system:
• Lack of financial documentation
• Your failure to provide birth certificates for your children
• Breakdown of communications between your lawyer and your spouse's lawyer
• Incomplete divorce application
• Insufficient information for preparation of the divorce petition
• Lack of cooperation by your spouse
While there are other reasons your lawyer may be unable to properly prepare the divorce application and petition for submission into the legal system, these are some of the more common ones. There are several ways around this, but they are much more costly; in most cases it is better to just wait for your case to come into court and allow the court to make the decisions. It would be better on the part of the spouse to negotiate the terms because if the court has to make the decision, it will more than likely be in your favor simply because of his or her lack of cooperation.
Submission into the legal system doesn't mean you will be divorced soon or even that the court will place your case on its upcoming calendar: it simply means you have completed all the other divorce steps and are ready for the last one—hopefully. If everything is in order and your spouse doesn't contest the divorce, things will go smoothly from this point forward. Otherwise, you can look for a long drawn out case that could take a year or more to become final with all ancillaries filed and complete as well.