Jurisdictional Affidavits for Divorce
How do I get a jurisdictional affidavit for divorce? I don’t even know what that is. Can I find one online? My name is James Wirth. I am a lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma and that is the exact question we received through one of our websites. Someone looking for a jurisdictional affidavit for divorce. So first off, that’s a relatively new thing that we see. So prior to COVID, if you wanted to enter a divorce, one of the parties, even if it’s an agreed divorce, which a lot of times they start off not agreed, eventually an agreement is entered, most cases don’t ultimately go to trial.
We have an agreed order that’s gonna be presented to the judge. And under Oklahoma law, somebody has to give testimony. So one party would appear and that party’s attorney or the judge would ask that person questions to establish that jurisdiction is appropriate. So somebody is staying under oath that they’ve been a resident of the state of Oklahoma for six months, filing the petition, resident of Tulsa County for 30 days to filing the petition that the marriage is damaged beyond repair. They haven’t had a bankruptcy in the last five years.
Transition to Testimony by Affidavit
There’s certain questions that the court wants to hear, particularly to establish jurisdiction and to establish that the marriage is damaged beyond repair. That’s supposed to be under oath presented to the judge. Okay, well then COVID happens. People still wanna get divorced, but the courts are closed and the judges don’t wanna be in the same room with other people for safety reasons. So a lot of it switched over by doing that testimony by affidavit. So that’s where we talk about our jurisdictional affidavit for divorce.
Instead of in-person testimony, now we’re doing some of those through an affidavit submitted to the court. So where do you find a form for that? I don’t know where there’s a particular form that may be available online. However, what I can do, we do have a form because we use it on a regular basis and I will make it available online for anybody to use as a Google Doc.
Access Our Example Jurisdictional Affidavit
So if you wanna look in the comments here or on this page, you should find a link to where you have our example of what one is in Google Docs, where you can just save that as your version, enter the appropriate information specific to you and utilize that. But at my recommendation, if you are going through a proceeding in a court in Oklahoma, you probably do want an attorney and certainly wanna get legal advice specific to your circumstances.
Get Professional Legal Guidance
So do reach out, you can talk to an attorney with my office by going online to makelaweasy.com.
