Q: Help regarding divroce case

A: We attorneys understand without a doubt that New York's economy is severely challenged, and that the public's ability to retain attorneys to represent them in divorces is equally challenged. We do the best we can within the constraints imposed upon us by numerous ethical rules, but we cannot represent individual askers on this website.

The asker here wants an explanation of the clerk's entries on a website. We will ignore the obvious typographical error in the date of filing and the appearance date. However, we cannot opine as to what the rest of these entries mean. First and foremost, we have no idea whether the asker properly served the summons with notice upon the defendant spouse. We do not even know if the asker used a summons with notices or something else to start her divorce.

We read about an appearance, but uncontested divorce typically do not have any appearances. Here, there may be an appearance for technical reasons like an unserved summons with notice, or perhaps simply a court's way of checking the status of the file. The marking "administrative" hints at the latter eventuality.

We cannot emphasize enough how important a lawyer is in prosecuting a divorce - even an uncontested one. There are too many confusing and vague rules and procedures to getting disentangled from a marriage. Evident from this listing is that everything is missing except the asker's original filing. The asker will not know what rights she has and what rights she does not have. We cannot explain all of those here because we are not her attorney.