Customer Reviews

How to Do Your Divorce in California (CD-ROM) (a guide for Petitioners and Respondents (Out-of-Court Divorce a Complete Kit)

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Although this book alone doesn't cover all of my issues, it and its companion book on contested divorces contain all of the current family law forms and provide excellent descriptions and discussions of how to use the forms. The process is complex however and I do have to read sections over and over to figure out what to do and how to do it. I also I have used many other resources including the California statutes, rules of court and case law.

I don't quite understand the difficulties other users have experienced with the forms provided on cd-rom. The forms are all .pdf files and can be opened in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (full version), data can be entered, and I have had no trouble saving the forms. I suspect those using just Acrobat Reader are unable to save the forms and have to print them out immediately, which would be an inconvenience. The California Courts site also allows forms to be downloaded, filled out, printed out, but not saved. Those wishing to save forms may want to purchase Adobe Acrobat (full version) which is kind of expensive but a great program or one of the cheaper third-party programs that create, open, and save .pdf files.

The forms software, which is necessary if you want to generate your own court forms, comes on a CD entitled "BONUS PAC", a legal harbinger of the disappointment to come. I can just imagine them saying to the judge, "Well, what did plaintiff expect from a free BONUS PAC?" Anyway, the software only works with the Ancient Acrobat 4.05, and most computer professional folks like me have to install the latest version (5.x) of Acrobat in order to function. Unfortunately, it initially *appears* to work with Acrobat 5.x. Consequently, and WITHOUT WARNING, the software proceeded to lose hours and hours of painful work I did not particularly want to repeat. To my surprise, tech support responded that they have known about the bug for a long time, and somehow implied it was my fault to have not checked the website. [Which I had checked, by the way, and was somehow not astute enough to read through all the technical bulletins to find this one.] Too bad they couldn't see fit to put some kind of sticker or label on this book or 'BONUS PAC' to warn me before I invested and lost a lot of time, particularly since the book is dated 1/2003 and Acrobat 4.x went off the market more than 2 years ago. How much could it possibly cost them to correct the bug and make it available for download? Apparently, too much for them to consider spending. No plans to repair the problem have been reported. And don't think about using the forms standalone in Acrobat; they are secured and automatically DELETE ALL OF THEIR OWN DATA when you try to reopen them, a particularly noxious security measure that prevents anyone from working around the bug.

This book proports to walk you through the process step by step, but provides only one badly done overview/decision tree. This means, at any given step, you are sent off to other chapters to hunt down yet another required form or set of instructions. The writer seems to have spent more time on glib commentary than on crafting a cogent, step-by-step guide through the labyrinth of forms, if/then instruction sets, and filing processes. I should have been alerted by the cover blurb that "Divorce Helpline Services" are avaialble. Use this book and you'll surely be ponying up extra cash to their phone support service, as wading through this "guide" will require, surprise, their expert help. I guess book sales don't pay well enough. After spending months with this book I have two ideas for the author's next edition:
1)A REAL decision tree that walks the reader through his/her uniqiue situation, and,
2)Junk the vast majority of the text in favor of consise bullet points and or checklists.
The forms are worthwhile, though none of the data is savable. Print it out and close the doc, and it's gone--Ouch! I can't imagine why this book is such a big seller.