Natalie Sanchez: Divorce Flowchart

My partner, Mathew Scuderi, and I chose to represent the process of filing for divorce in a flowchart. While marriage is an act that binds two people together in matrimony, binding in a legal domestic relationship, a divorce works to separate and officially terminate a marriage. 

The process of filing for divorce is a very tedious one. You start out by filing your divorce complaint (which consists of filing out four forms that ask you personal information about yourself, your spouse, and your relationship with the later.) After this you must take these forms to the family court 1133 Chestnut St. to receive a court term and number for your claim. You must pay a filing fee of $303.48 to file your complaint. If you feel like you will not be able to afford paying this fee, you can try to fill out the In Forma Pauperis form, which requests that your filing fee be waived. After you have received your court term and number, you must “serve” your spouse by giving them a copy of the complaint that you filed at the family court- this basically just lets your spouse know that you want a divorce. They must then sign a paper that states that they received the divorce complaint, so that you can “prove your service” (or prove that you have notified your spouse about your intent to divorce) before you present your complaint in court. After you have “proved your service,” you must complete several other papers that prove that you have permission from your spouse to file for divorce and that line everything up for the court trial date. In the end, once all of your papers have been reviewed, you will receive a paper in the mail, documenting your divorce. 

Filling out the paper work was extremely tedious and repetitive. They asked for several pieces of information more than once. My partner could not help me the whole course of the working period because of some complications that came up, so it was difficult to fill out the forms without his input. 

The process of getting a divorce is a long and tedious one. It takes time and patience. If I could change anything about the process of divorce, it would be minimizing the amount of paperwork that people have to fill out to get a divorce. The main steps to getting a divorce are to fill out the initial complaint, "serve" your spouse, fill out some other papers of information, getting your spouse’s consent to go through with the divorce, and finalizing the divorce. I would eliminate the parts of these forms where several requests for the same information are asked for, so that whoever wants to file for divorce would only have to fill out their information once. I also could not find the divorce forms on the internet, which made the process of mock filing for divorce harder than it needed to be. I would make the filing process easier by mandating that the divorce forms be posted to the internet on the family court’s webpage of the Philadelphia city council's website. These modifications would eliminate some of the stress of filing out the paper work for this process. 

I feel like the process is so long and tedious because the judge needs to know the history of the couple’s relationship before he can grant them divorce. He also needs to take into account how many people are dependent on the two parties and what things property they can divide. Basically, I these forms are needed in order to get the whole story of the former relationship and their income, property, etc. This way the judge will know what changes to make to the individual couples’ fiscal records (in regards to money, housing, and other things of that nature). I also think that this process takes a long time in order to give the spouses enough time to think through the divorce; they need to make sure they want to go through with this. 

On our flowchart, you will notice that near the middle-bottom part of the visual, there is a big block of text. I tried to break this block up into several pieces, but did not have enough space in my chart for another box. I used a separate lucid chart account from the one that our school provides for us, therefore, I could only have a limited amount of blocks in the chart.

Here is the link to our flowchart. 

(I had some issues with lucidchart. I apologize for the inconvenience. I will fix this later.)