Divorce is a contentious and emotional process and it is natural to wish for the process to be over as soon as possible. Unfortunately, divorce is a complex legal process and there are several steps involved that must be completed. This means that divorces rarely happen quickly. In fact, a divorce can sometimes take several month depending upon the circumstances.
How Long Will Divorce Take?
Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict exactly how long your divorce will take since there are many factors that affect the length of the divorce process. Some of the different things that can affect how long your divorce takes include:
- Whether your spouse agrees to the divorce.
- Whether your spouse responds to the petition for divorce by the deadline.
- How quickly the court can and will schedule a divorce hearing.
- Whether you must take a required divorce education program, which may be mandated if you have children and you and your spouse are not able to agree on a custody arrangement and parenting time.
- Whether you and your spouse can agree out of court to a settlement or whether issues need to be litigated for a family court judge to make a decision on.
- Whether there are any special circumstances that can delay the divorce, such as a spouse hiding assets that will need to be investigated by professionals such as a forensic accountant.
- The complexity of the issues to decide, including the amount of shared marital assets that must be divided up between you and your spouse.
All of these different factors can have a major impact on whether your divorce takes weeks, months or even years to resolve. Even in a best case scenario, however, you are usually looking at several months until the dissolution of marriage is final as you need time to file the papers with the court, have your spouse served, negotiate an out-of-court settlement and have a hearing scheduled.
The best way to speed up your divorce and make sure that it is finalized as quickly as it can be is to work with an attorney and to come to an out-of-court settlement agreement. The sooner you do this, the sooner your divorce process can move forward and you can move on with your lives. If you do not come to a divorce settlement agreement, then you could find yourself in a protracted and expensive litigation that drags on for several months. You typically want to avoid this both because of the time and stress involved and because of the costs associated with a litigated divorce.
An experienced divorce attorney can help you to be successful in negotiating a divorce agreement and can keep the process of dissolving your marriage moving forward so you can get divorced as quickly as possible.