Preparing Florida Court Documents: How Much Detail?

Preparing divorce documents for court filing is tricky business in Florida. We have already talked about financial information and identity theft. The necessity of adding more detail to the divorce forms has been the subject of previous posts. Today, we discuss the rules for determining how much is too much information in your court document.

In Petitions, you should add detail if you are requesting the court take action on any of the following issues:

• Non-marital assets or debts that you believe were commingled or converted into marital assets
• Sole parental responsibility
• Contested primary residential parent
• EUP
• Waste, depletion
• Name change
• Partition

In Answers, you are only responding to the statements in the petition. No details are necessary. This is also true for Responses to Motions. The Answer or Response contains only statements such as, “Respondent denies the allegations in paragraph 3,5,6,7 and 10.” If you include the details of why you dispute the petition, you may get a Motion to Strike your document.

If you are the Respondent and want to make allegations of your own, you should file a Counter-Petition with your Answer. You MUST file a Counter-Petition with your Answer or it will be too late. A Counter-Petition also will allow you to continue the case without any additional filing fees if the Petitioner decides to drop the case.

So the general rule on detail is YES for the Petition and Counter-Petition and NO for Answers and Responses.

Remember that Florida court files are public records. Anyone can look at your divorce court file, so you want to be careful about the allegations and responses you put in any Florida divorce court document.