Top 3 Delay Tactics Used in California Family Court

The top three delay tactics in California family court. Discovery. Discovery motions, discovery games — it happens all the time. You need the discovery to develop your case. You need to marshal evidence to prove or disprove certain things. So you propound discovery, but the other side always objects, always gives you half-baked responses, and you typically end up in court. What that does is, you can't get to your trial until you finish your discovery. You have a right to be heard on your discovery motions before the trial. So that's one tactic: to delay and delay, and waste a lot of money. Number two would be requesting an evidentiary hearing. Most cases are entitled to have an evidentiary hearing and not just a hearing on pleadings — that's at the discretion of the court. However, a lot of people don't need one. A lot of people don't need more than a 20-minute request for order to get the job done. But they say that they need to have an evidentiary hearing, it's going to take multiple days, they're going to parade into the court multiple witnesses. And they do that because they know that that's going to be set well into the future, whenever there's a time slot. And it may be fractured, so you don't even get contiguous days — you have to do it over the course of a couple months. So that's another issue. Finally, continuances. I've mentioned continuances before. To me they're a necessary evil, but let's talk about the evil part of that: the pernicious aspect of people requesting continuances just to delay. Why would somebody ever do that? That's a great question. I'll get into that somewhere else as well. But what do they do with these continuances? Well, they say, "We need this, we're not ready, there's been a problem here, somebody calls out sick." Believe it or not, people call out sick and don't show up in court. Or they say, "Gosh, we need a new attorney, I'm going to hire somebody else in the 11th hour." That's going to delay the trial if the court allows it. The court is pretty liberal with this. And again, some of it is necessary. But a lot of it is hijinks, and a lot of it just wastes time and delays.