Queens Divorce Grounds

A Queens divorce grounds lawyer can help you figure out the most appropriate avenue for filing your divorce and moving forward. The state of New York was the last one to allow for no-fault grounds. In the past, many people had to spend a great deal of time and a lot of money working through fault based grounds for divorce.

These trials took and extensive amount of time because of the work required to prove that the other party was responsible for some type of error or fault. Now with the advent of no-fault divorce in New York, a couple simply must show that they have experienced an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage from which they cannot recover.

There are seven grounds for divorce or legally acceptable reasons to initiate a divorce within New York state. A divorce grounds attorney in Queens can help you figure out whether any of these apply and whether it makes more sense to pursue fault based or no-fault based grounds. A divorce grounds attorney in Queens is the person you will turn to over the duration of your case to ensure that all of the relevant details have been addressed in distribution of property and beyond.

The most common method through which people file for divorce in Queens and the rest of New York is on no-fault grounds. This means that you must have experienced an irretrievable breakdown for a minimum period of six months. The marriage must have been over for a minimum of six months and in order for the divorce proceedings to move through the court, all critical issues such as debt, division of marital property, support and custody of the children will need to have been closed out.

You can settle these matters based on a separation agreement that you already had in place or based on a determination that you come to with the other spouse through alternative dispute resolution. If you are unable to come to terms of agreement in these other methods, you will need to leave the matters up to the judge. This is the only no-fault based way to file for divorce. However, you may also consider your options to file under fault grounds in New York. One method of fault based grounds is based on inhuman and cruel treatment. The judge will be looking at specific cruelty acts that must have occurred in the last five years.

Another common ground is abandonment. The spouse must have clearly abandoned you for at least a year. In order to use the grounds of imprisonment, the other party must have been placed in prison for at least three years in a row and must have gone to prison once the marriage started. The plaintiff is eligible to use this after the spouse was let out of prison or still in prison. The grounds of adultery put the burden of proof on the plaintiff to indicate that the spouse engaged in adultery over the course of the marriage and this can be very hard to prove. Divorce following a legal separation agreement is another method in which the defendant and the plaintiff will sign and file an official separation agreement and live separately for a minimum of one year. A divorce after a judgement of separation is the final grounds to file for divorce in New York but isn’t referenced very often. This is a situation in which the Supreme Court puts together a judgement of separation if the couple stays apart for at least one year.