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First in a 9 part series of tutorial videos on how to draft and process a divorce judgment in California. This video discusses the two different approaches you can use to draft the FL-180 Judgment of Dissolution. One is to use a collection of Judicial Council court forms and the other is to use a Marital Settlement Agreement.
If you decide to go with the Judicial Council forms approach, you are going to use a collection of Judicial Council forms to set forth the terms of your settlement agreement. There is a Judicial Council form you can use to set forth your agreement about the division of your property and debts. There are various other Judicial Council forms you can use to set forth your agreement regarding child custody. There are a number of other Judicial Council forms you can use to set forth your agreement regarding child support. There is also a Judicial Council form to set forth your agreement regarding spousal support. If you decide to use the Judicial Council forms approach, you essentially fill out all the forms you need to describe the terms of the settlement agreement you reached with your spouse and you then attach those forms to another two page Judicial Council form known as the “Judgment” form, which is FL-180. You will then have a divorce judgment that you can submit to the court for a judge to sign.
All the Judicial Council forms you will need for your divorce judgment can be found in our Court Forms Data Base. You can fill out each form and print each form for free.
The second way to draft your divorce judgment is to use a Marital Settlement Agreement. A Marital Settlement Agreement takes the place of the various Judicial Council forms, except the two page FL-180 “Judgment” form. You will use the FL-180 judgment form with both the Judicial Council forms approach and the Marital Settlement Agreement approach.
A Marital Settlement Agreement is simply a written contract that spells out the terms of the settlement agreement you have made with your spouse. The Marital Settlement Agreement will contain provisions about how your assets and debts are to be divided, provisions about spousal support, and, if you have minor children, provisions about child custody and child support. The Marital Settlement Agreement will be attached to your FL-180 “Judgment " form and then you will submit your Judgment to the court for a judge to sign.
Either approach will work. The main problem with the Judicial Council forms approach is that the forms make it difficult to set forth detailed provisions or unique provisions you may want included in your settlement agreement. The Judicial Council forms work well for simple cases, with simple agreements. However, if you want to do anything that is unique or somewhat detailed or complicated, the Judicial Council forms can be difficult to use. You will quickly understand the problem if you start filling out the Judicial Council forms.
With a Marital Settlement Agreement, you are not limited to an agreement that consists of boxes on forms that you check and small blank spaces on the forms in which you try to cram the terms of your settlement agreement. With a Marital Settlement Agreement, you can write the exact agreement you want. You can include all the unique provisions you want, in as much detail as you want, and exclude provisions you don’t want in your agreement.
We offer a “Marital Settlement Agreement” template for a nominal charge. If you elect to purchase this template, you start with the framework or template of a Marital Settlement Agreement consisting of introductory provisions, then the “body” of the agreement, and concluding with a host of concluding “boilerplate” legal paragraphs that lawyers frequently include in Marital Settlement Agreements. The “body” of the Marital Settlement Agreement includes various topics that parties typically want to include in their settlement agreement.
