Introduction
Our everyday lives are busy. Between work, caring for your children, and trying to maintain your household, you can easily find yourself with no moment to spare. By the time that nine or 10 o’clock at night comes around, you are just spent and you need some rest.
This kind of fast-paced lifestyle can lead us to misplace things at times. Important documents are put in that famous “location where you will know where to look when you really need something,” but that place never seems to be remembered when the document is really needed. You wind up losing important things and simply don’t know what to do to retrieve them.
Losing Your Child Support Order
Sadly, important documents get lost all the time. One of those may be your child support order. A lot of times, people set this kind of thing aside immediately after the divorce is finalized, and don’t really give it another thought. They put in a file cabinet, drawer, or in a box somewhere, thinking that they will never really need this document again.
Unfortunately, a situation can arise where it can be quite important for you to have this document. Maybe you are switching jobs and you need a copy of that order to give to your payroll department so that they can have the amount automatically deducted and sent to your former spouse or the mother of your child each month. Maybe you are considering seeking an adjustment in child support and you need the original documentation to see if you qualify for an adjustment.
A number of circumstances can arise beyond these where you may need that order. The problem is that if you can’t find it, you may have no clue of exactly what to do.
How to Get a Copy of My Child Support Order
Fortunately, there are ways where you can get a copy of this order. Where you want to start is by contacting the court clerk’s office in the county in which the original order was filed. It is important to note that you should not go to the court clerk in the county you reside in if this was not the county where your divorce or where the court order for child support was filed. They will not be able to get you a copy of the court order.
When you contact the court, it is important that you are able to provide them with as much information as possible. This should include such things as the name of both parties involved, the court order number, if you know it, and the date when the order was filed.
All of that information sounds great, but if you have lost the court order, it’s likely that you have nothing other than the names of the parties involved. While this makes the process a little more difficult, it is not impossible.
Most cases are filed with the names of the parties involved. In fact, if you know just your own name, which we hope you would, you should still be able to get a copy of the order. This kind of information is retained within most courthouse computer systems by name of each party involved.
There will be some fee involved in getting a copy of this order. This is usually a marginal fee, no more than $10 or $20, nothing that will break your budget in any way, but is still required in order to get the court order.
What to Do If There Is an Issue Getting Your Child Support Order
This is usually an extremely smooth process, which enables you to get a copy of the child support order within a day or two at most. When there is a lot less information that is known, requiring the court clerk’s office to spend more time searching for the order, especially if it was some time ago, like 25 years or more, you may have to wait up to 10 business days to receive the documentation.
However, it is realistic to expect that there are occasions where you may have some real challenges getting a copy of this order. Not every clerk’s office is as efficient as others, and there may just be an issue with the documentation being misplaced, or sealed in some way, denying you access to it.
There may also be circumstances where you don’t know exactly what county the document was filed in. That sounds odd, but if you have been injured in some way and are unable to remember or contact the county, leaving a dependent to try to handle your affairs, they may have no idea where the documentation was filed. They may have no idea even where to look at.
Contact a Family Law Attorney
Should you find yourself in a situation where you are unable to get the court order, the best thing for you to do is contact a family law attorney. A lawyer is able to research through many of the court computer systems so that they can locate virtually any court proceeding that has occurred in the state of Arizona.
What this means is that if there is a court filing on record, no matter what county or jurisdiction it was filed, an attorney should be able to locate that. By seeking the assistance of a lawyer, you will not only be able to find records you may not have been able to locate otherwise, but an attorney will also be able to assist you in getting past any snafu that has gotten in the way.
Call the Family Law Team at (480) 467-4348 to hire a lawyer today.