How to File for Divorce in Connecticut: Steps & Considerations

One common question here in Connecticut is what are the grounds that you can use to file for divorce? Well, the most common ground is the one that we think of as the no-fault ground. And that's when a marriage has broken down irretrievably with no hope of reconciliation. When you use that ground for divorce, what you're essentially saying is, my marriage has ended and we aren't getting back together.

As long as one of the two spouses will testify to that under oath, the court can grant your divorce in Connecticut. There are also what are referred to as four fault grounds here in Connecticut—things like abandonment, cruelty, and adultery—but those are far less common because unless you can prove all of the things you need to prove to the court that that thing actually happened, the court doesn't have the authority to grant your divorce.

That's why the no-fault ground is the most common. Here in Connecticut, the process for filing for divorce is something that is fairly straightforward, but there is some opportunity to be very intentional about it as well. One of the first things you want to think about when you're filing for a divorce in Connecticut is what courthouse you should file it in.

Some courts tend to have busier dockets than others. They might have a speedier way to get court dates and hearings and experienced family law practitioners. They can give you an insight on which courts are more or less busy here in Connecticut. In some towns, you're actually able to choose between a couple of different courthouses.

So there can be an opportunity to be a little bit intentional there when you're choosing what court to actually file your divorce in. After you and your attorney have talked and have decided which courthouse you're going to, you'll put together a summons and complaint, and you'll figure out how to serve that on your spouse.

Your lawyer will guide you through this process. Sometimes we use a marshal to serve these documents on your spouse right here in the state of Connecticut if your spouse lives here. The process is a little bit more complicated if your spouse lives out of state or out of the country. And so you want to make sure that you work with a lawyer who's familiar with all the various permutations if you have a more complex interstate or international divorce.

Once you get the lawsuit going—because a divorce is a formal lawsuit—you'll start to see court dates happen, and you'll want to talk to your lawyer about what to expect at all of those initial court dates as you proceed through the divorce. As people approach divorce, one of the very natural questions is how much the divorce is going to cost.

When I counsel clients about this, one of the things I try to encourage them to think about is how much acrimony there is between the spouses. It tends to be the biggest impact on how expensive the divorce is. So, for example, if you and your spouse are able to reach agreements outside of court—often that's through negotiations between your lawyers—you don't necessarily have to sit down and hash it out with your spouse yourself, but if you're able to reach agreements on some or all of the issues, generally speaking, that's going to be a less expensive divorce in terms of both time and attorney's fees.

On the other hand, if you have difficulty reaching agreements, you're just too far apart and you wind up in a fully contested divorce trial, well, obviously that's going to be a long divorce in terms of time and also in terms of money, too.

Frequently, if you have a divorce trial, you're going to be retaining experts and paying those experts to do reports and to testify. That can be expensive. There will be more depositions. Those are expensive. So the costs really go up when you're asking a judge to make decisions for you. When you've made the decision to divorce and you're trying to figure out what your life will look like, one of the things that you'll often think about along the way is how long is my divorce itself going to take?

So there's a general answer that I'll give you that we see most divorces taking around nine to 12 months. That's the most common range. Divorces definitely fall outside those ranges. Some divorces are much shorter, and some divorces can last a year and a half or, you know, even in rare cases, something like two years.

Here are the things that go on in divorces that tend to make them shorter or longer. Shorter divorces, the two spouses tend to be able to reach agreements outside of court. Now that doesn't mean that they're sitting down at the kitchen table and having every agreement themselves. It might mean that their lawyers are negotiating on their behalves with each other, but that still counts.

That's still reaching agreements outside of court, and that can radically shorten the time frame of your divorce. As opposed to needing a judge to decide and having to wait for court dates for the hearings that it will take to have the judge decide. On the other hand, if you're not able to resolve issues and you do need a judge, or if there are a lot of issues that you experience along the way that you're asking the court to resolve for you, that's going to be one of the things that makes for a longer divorce.

When we divide marital property in Connecticut, we use a series of factors to try and figure out how to divide it. And what those factors get at is to help the court decide what would be an equitable division of property. So Connecticut isn't one of the states where we just divide everything 50/50.

It's a little bit more complex than that. But in that complexity, there's actually great opportunity for creativity. So what are the factors that a court looks to when it's trying to decide what would be equitable? Well, things like the age of the parties, what their assets are, what their prospects for future earnings are, their education, what their health is.

Those are the kind of factors that a court looks at to give them a full picture so that they can start to decide what might be an equitable way to divide the property. When the courts are considering whether or not there will be alimony, which is also called spousal support in Connecticut, they look at a series of factors.

So those factors are used to determine a few things. They're used to determine whether or not there will be alimony at all. They're used to determine the amount of alimony if there is alimony and also what the length of that alimony will be. These factors are things like what are the ages of the spouse?

What's the health condition of the spouse? What's their educational background? Their professional experience? Their future prospects for employment and income? Things like that. So there are a variety of factors that come into play in every divorce when a court is trying to decide whether or not they'll be alimony.