Transferring property without the cooperation of the other person can come up occasionally during a divorce. If you’re in the midst of a divorce and let’s say that the other person has been ordered to sign a deed and they’ve absconded or they’re not around, or they’re not willing to cooperate. What the court can do in those instances is they can actually appoint a person under West Virginia law to serve in the place of the person who’s not cooperating.
Let’s say that you get award of the house and the divorce and the judge orders you to take ownership of the property but you’ve got an issue because the other person will not sign a deed. What the court will do sometimes is in the event that the person cannot be compelled in some way to sign the deed and the court has a lot of power to actually make them sign the deed. If there are other ways to do it, one thing that you can do is you can actually have the court appoint somebody known as a special commissioner and the job with the special commissioner is to sign the deed. Under West Virginia law they actually have the authority to do that.
What they’ll do is they’ll actually, literally sign the deed on behalf of the person and it’s totally permissible under West Virginia law. It happens sometimes or sometimes what the court will do is appoint somebody to actually go and sell the property. For example, let’s say you’ve got a bunch of personal property that there’s no agreement on where it goes. In this case, the judge might order it to be sold in the event that there needs to be some money to be made up.
Let’s say that the person is, there’s no agreement and with the property that’s left out there that has not been dealt with in some way, the court can order somebody and by the way, the special commissioners are typically going to be attorneys who do this. Whether it’s signing a deed or disposing of property. What will happen is literally the special commissioner who was appointed by the judge will sometimes be appointed to sell the property on the courthouse steps.
This process requires some notice to go out. If you’ve ever looked in a newspaper, sometimes you’ll see notices about property being so sold on the court steps and that’s literally what happened sometimes. Then what happens is after the special commissioner is appointed to sell the property, the personal property, and when I’m talking about personal property, I’m talking about that could be clothing, that could be anything other than house and what we call real property, which is land. Anything other than that’s actually tangible, something that you could hold or feel, that’s considered to be personal property. Well, the court can appoint somebody to actually sell property on the courthouse steps. It’s what we call it here in West Virginia, a special commissioner. That’s a little bit of information for you in terms of what happens when you need to transfer property and the other spouse is not cooperating during your West Virginia divorce.
