Monte and Jenny had been in a long term relationship, but never married. They have two minor children, a six year old son and an eight year old daughter. They had been living together as a family for over ten years, but they grew apart and began discussions of how to deal with the children and everything else when they parted ways.
These parties were not married, so there was no “marital” property involved, but the two of them had acquired various assets (vehicles, real estate, etc) during the relationship, to which they both contributed to, but for the most part were not jointly titled properties. Monte’s name was individually on the title to most of these things.
Contractually, he could have simply demanded it all be turned over to him, and a court would have to agree. But these two folks still genuinely cared for each other, and wanted things to be fair. The two of them talked through all of the issues they could think of and essentially were in agreement about what to do about the children and their property.
Jenny came to me and explained all of the above and with that, I prepared a Settlement Agreement, Parenting Plan and Child Support Documents based on her notes, with some minor editing by the parties, we executed all of the documents to start the case (complaint, summons, waiver of service, etc) and all of the documents to resolve the case (settlement, parenting plan, final order, etc) and then e-filed all them at once.
We then waited for 31 days to go by and on that 31st day, I filed a Motion for Judgement on the Pleadings, asking the court to enter the final orders without a hearing. On the 40th day we received the final order. From the initial client meeting to the final order was 51 days and Jenny’s total spend was $1,750.00. This is the ideal way to handle any family law case!
