At Santucci Family Law, we assist clients with all aspects of divorce proceedings to terminate a marriage or domestic partnership and establish agreements and orders allowing former spouses or domestic partners to move forward as single people.
Six months after the filing and service of the Petition for Dissolution (the “cooling off” period), the court may terminate marital status, returning both parties to single individuals, upon an application by one party. We work diligently and strategically with our clients to resolve their cases in a preferably efficient and cost-effective manner, allowing them to transition as quickly as possible through the proceeding.
However, it oftentimes takes much longer to resolve the property, support and custodial issues such that the “six-month rule” should be taken as a minimum waiting period for eligibility for divorce. It is critically important that you obtain expert legal advice (and if a dispute arises, skilled advocacy) to protect your rights and interests in a dissolution.
California is a no fa divorce State since 1969 California has been no fault I believe it’s the oldest no fault state out there so essentially the Court’s not going to consider fault whose fault it was uh in giving the two parties the divorce that they’re seeking and they’re not going to award property or support necessarily based on fault so none of that testimony is going to come in whose fault it was what happened in the marriage what was the contributing factor the demise of the marriage Etc the Court’s not going to listen to any of that
It does not matter which spouse files for divorce the filing spouse is going to be known as the petitioner and the responding spouse the respondent and there’s no benefit or detriment to you if you were the petitioner or the respondent the Court’s going to treat you equally
Once you file for divorce there’s a mandatory waiting period of six months so I would say definitely the six months that’s a cooling off period to determine if you can maybe reconcile or not but realistically the process you go to to disclose assets to Value assets award assets between the two of you to work out some kind of a solution by stipulation or to put your case up for trial you’re looking at probably a year minimum to get all of those things fine tuned and some divorces can go much longer than that depending on how complicated um the assets are if there’s custody issues involved it just depends.