If you’re about to start a divorce, you may already know that the divorce process can take a long time. If you have kids or even just a shared home, you might be concerned about how you and your spouse will manage those things while you’re moving toward a final decree that will determine parenting time and asset division.
That’s where temporary orders come in. The easiest way to think about them is they’re the rules you follow while you are in the process of finalizing your divorce. If you look at Bexar County’s Standing Orders, which are the orders that apply to every divorce suit and every suit affecting the parent-child relationship in Bexar County. The Standing Orders include rules about safety and civility, largely to protect children from some of the hurt that can happen during a divorce/.
Because Temporary Orders are deemed to be in the best interest of the child, it is best to establish what is in the child’s best interest early on in your case, rather than waiting until getting closer to the final hearing to retain counsel. At times people will try to represent themselves at the beginning of a case to save money or try to get the case worked out and plan to retain counsel towards the end. At the Law Office of Lisa A. Vance, we’ve seen a lot of divorce cases, and generally find that courts often lean towards leaving temporary orders in place as long as it works for the parties, so it is important to retain strong counsel from the beginning of your case to the end.
This should be a compelling reason to talk to a family lawyer early in the process of getting divorced. Ideally, you’ll talk to a lawyer even before you initiate the divorce, to know what’s possible. But if you have a lawyer on board as you get started, you can use your temporary orders as a bridge to what you’re looking for in the final decree.
While temporary orders usually spell out the basics, they can be as detailed as your final orders, and sometimes they are. If you feel your divorce might go beyond the school year and into the summer, you can create temporary orders that address summer parenting schedules and summer camp considerations. For example, if you can agree on how summer camp expenses will be split and how summer possession and access will be split, it would be ideal to include that in temporary orders.
Also, if one or more of your children has extracurricular activities during the school year or the summer, temporary orders can address any cost-sharing and logistics you need to factor in to make those happen. While neither temporary orders nor a final decree can predict every situation you’ll encounter in your post-divorce life, ones that are well-drawn-up look to anticipate what you’ll need in the future as well as what you need in the present.
Note that just because you want something in the temporary orders, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will stay in. Once they’re filed, your spouse will have an opportunity to respond, and if there’s something in it that your spouse finds objectionable, it’s something you’ll have to reconcile. But it’s possible that issues that can linger in divorces, like property division or taxes, will be initially addressed in the temporary orders process.
And, of course, if you’re dealing with a difficult spouse, having temporary orders in place protects you and your children. It can also have more teeth in it, including fines, if that’s necessary to dissuade a spouse of certain actions.
The ultimate lesson from this should be the importance of talking to a lawyer before you get divorced. It can save you a lot more money in the long run if you have good counsel in a divorce from the beginning. Some people want to wait until after the ball gets rolling, but if you file or respond to a petition and settle for default temporary orders, you could be missing out on having a strong advocate during an important part of the process.