Include in Your Application for the Emergency, That You’ve Tried to Find Your Ex

Video Transcribed: So you heard a horror story about your child, but when you try to get ahold of the ex for the purposes of notice, you can’t find her. You have no idea where she’s disappeared to. What do you do? Well, we’re going to talk about that today.

My name is Brian L. Jackson. I am an attorney for father’s rights with Dads.Law, And we’re talking about what to do when your ex is unavailable in an emergency situation. As we talked about in my last video, there is a notice requirement by local rule in Tulsa County if you have an emergency, in a custody case, and you’re asking the court to take emergency action on behalf of your children.

So that does beg an interesting question. What about if she’s unrepresented and you can’t find her? What do you do then? Obviously, you still want to be able to take action and you don’t want her to appear out of the woodwork and take the kids back.

So what do you do? Well, what you need to do is include in your application for the emergency, the fact that you’ve tried and failed to find your ex, and ideally you want to spell out exactly what efforts you made to find your ex, which means that you better make an effort.

So in that situation, if you hire counsel, you’re going to have your attorney go look for her and take whatever steps they can. If that means a skip trace or whatever, to try to locate her.

And then when they can’t, they’re going to file an affidavit with your application for an emergency, basically outlining the efforts that were made and the fact that it failed so that the judge understands that that rule needs to be waived under those circumstances. And I can tell you from experience, the judges will waive the rule as long as you give them a reason to, but you have to give them a reason to.

So that’s what you do in that situation. And this is another example of one of the situations where you really do need counsel. This stuff gets complicated, and if you don’t do it exactly right, then your emergency can be denied for a stupid reason.

So be aware of that upfront, handle it, make sure it’s handled appropriately. Make sure you communicate honestly with your lawyer. I can’t stress that enough, because if you don’t tell us stuff, we don’t know about it.

And most of the time, even if it’s something really unfavorable, we can deal with it. But only if we know. The worst situation to be in is to get slapped in the face with some random fact that we didn’t know because you didn’t bother to tell us. So be honest. And if you need help, go to dads.law.