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Our
legal system requires "serving notice on" the non-suing party,
which means informing your spouse that you want a divorce. Service
is usually accomplished by a process server handing papers to the other
spouse. Service
can also be acknowledged by the other spouse by signing an affidavit. If
you don’t
know where the other spouse is located, it will be necessary to give
notice by publishing a legal notice in a newspaper. This is called
divorce by publication. Such
a divorce takes any where from eight months to a year to accomplish.
To
obtain a divorce by publication, we will need to perform a search
for your spouse in the same general location that he or she was last
known to reside. We will
contact various agencies, such as the post office, the board of elections,
the different branches of the military, and the motor vehicles department,
and inquire whether they know of your spouse’s current whereabouts. We
will also search telephone directories and the Internet. If a person
is found with your spouse's name, we will then investigate further to determine
whether that person is actually your spouse. If through these efforts
we locate your spouse, we will then have notice of your divorce action
be personally served upon your spouse.
If our search
fails to locate your spouse, we will then apply to the court to issue
an order of publication. When a judge signs the order of publication, we
will send the legal notice to the newspaper named in the order for publication. The
legal notice must be published within thirty days after the judge
signed the order of publication and then must be published once a
week for the next three consecutive weeks, each on the same day of the week.
If
there is no response from your spouse within the allowed period
of time, we can file the divorce by default. In
approximately two to four months, you will receive your judgment
of divorce.
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2004-2008 by Jeffrey B. Peltz P.C.. All rights reserved. You may
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