Divorce Lawyer: Court Running in New Orleans

This article seeks to convey how it is that a family law attorney delivers documents to the courthouse and some of the various methods of doing so. At first, it can be a little confusing bring documents to and from the courthouse and therefore a little explanation might be beneficial for a new or recent divorce lawyer. One of the reasons that it can be important to learn this type of information is that with family law you will likely have a lot of contact with the court. This is unlike many other attorneys who hardly ever go to court or are not involved in the filing process. Another important reason to know how to do this is it helps to keep your costs down so that you do not have to hire a court runner or pay one of your employees to do this for you.

There are a number of different things that a divorce lawyer needs to know when filing in the civil District Court of New Orleans. Perhaps the first thing is when the attorney is seeking to file a new suit in order to begin the legal process of ending a marriage, dividing property, dealing with issues of child support or child custody, spousal support, or a number of other family law matters. There are two ways essentially going about this. The first involves you simply dropping the documents off at court and not bringing it to be judge for a date to be assigned to be heard on the matter. In other words you are not walking the documents through, so to speak. When doing this, you are generally seeking either no court date or not wishing to have an immediate court date assigned and you're willing to check back later to find out when your court date has been assigned to you.

The other way of doing this is to walk the documents through. As a divorce lawyer, this is done all the time because Louisiana utilizes summary procedure, which means that the other party does not generally need to answer the documents and that a lot of the incidental matters to the end of the marriage can be done quickly. The way that this generally works is that you will bring your new suit to the clerk of court, pay the filing fees and have it clocked in and filed with the clerk and then request to take the documents to the individual court section to have a date assigned before the District Judge to hear the merits of what you are asking for.

The next thing for a divorce lawyer to understand is that the sheriff and the civil clerk are not all in one and that you may need to work separately with the sheriff after you have finished with the civil clerk. This generally only applies when you are actually seeking sheriff service, but there are some other times when this can apply such as getting a final judgment certified that costs were paid with the sheriff even if no sheriff service was ever requested.

New Orleans divorce lawyer Will Beaumont provided this article for informational purposes, not legal advice.