Maybell, CO Divorce Law Firms & Lawyers

A party can proceed with a divorce even if they cannot find or serve the other party.  When you cannot find the other party, you must file a verified (notarized) motion stating that you have attempted to serve the party, your efforts, and last known address of the other party.  The court will hear the motion and may order publication of the petition for dissolution, meaning they publish it in the newspaper.  The other party has 30 days to respond or appear.  If they do not, the court will proceed with issuing a dissolution of the marriage.  However, the court cannot allocate property without personal service.  Therefore, you would, in practice, likely keep all of the property unless and until the other party shows up to claim some, at which point you could then have the court allocate the division of property if needed.

How can you preemptively be prepared for a divorce if I feel my spouse is up to something? Start! Now! Doing something, even if it's not much, is better than nothing. Confront and overcome your fears about the unknown by taking a step to knowing more. So what are the best ways to start, especially if you don't have a lot of money or a lot of enthusiasm for the subject? If you have Internet access, Google "how does divorce work in [then write name of your state]?" And start learning the lingo of divorce and how the process works both inside and outside of court. Mind you, not everything you read on the Internet is of high quality, but you should be able to tell the gems from the garbage without too much effort. Go to your local library, and ask the librarian what books on divorce are most often checked out. But don't stop there; also asked the librarian his or her opinion of what the best books on divorce are, regardless of how popular they may be. Check these books out and read them. If you liked them a lot, via copy for yourself and underline the part you like best and want to remember. Most cities have meet up groups that you can locate online who read together weekly or monthly to talk about divorce and help people understand it better and learn how to cope with divorce. Meetup.com is a great place to start. Finally, when you think you're ready to deal with the specific problems of your own divorce, and you have done your research and are armed with the knowledge divorce to help you pick a good lawyer, start interviewing lawyers and pick the one that best suits you. When interviewing lawyers, if the lawyer seems uncomfortable or annoyed with your questions and help you understand, that is almost certainly a lawyer to avoid.

Get copies of all the financial information you can, account numbers, most recent statement even if it's old, tax returns for the last three years. You are entitled to part of his retirement. Knowing the name and address of his employer will allow an attorney to get his retirement etc. info from his employer. If you want out, see a lawyer and start the process. You can't do anything preemptively other than knowing the extent of assets and debts. Sitting down and talking to him about things like assets is what functional families do periodically so you can do that without any discussion of divorce. If something happens to him, you should have things like passwords to access all the accounts. That in itself is a reasonable and ordinary discussion.