Today we’re going to be talking about emergency relief and your West Virginia divorce. When I say emergency relief, I’m talking about relief where you actually go to the court and you get almost instantaneous relief from the court. This is not for your everyday normal circumstances. It has to be very extraordinary circumstances for you to be granted this kind of relief.
Now, one of the things that you can certainly do is in the event that there is some sort of domestic violence, you can go over to the courthouse and get some relief. But we’re not going to be focusing on that today. I’ve talked before in another article about domestic violence. We’re going to be talking about other kinds of emergency relief that you can get from the courts.
Now, one of the things that you need to clearly establish is that you have to establish that there’s immediate and irreparable harm. That’s the clear threshold that you have to show is the irreparable harm in that it’s immediate. In other words, you need to have some sort of immediate action or you are going to be harmed in some way. An example would be if you have a situation clearly listed in the law like if somebody is trying to leave the state with the child to deprive West Virginia of jurisdiction. This would be grounds for immediate emergency relief.
What I’m talking about here is what we call Ex Parte Relief. Ex Parte Relief is whenever you go to the court because there’s going to be some irreparable harm and you can’t even notify the other person because if you notify the other person, they’re going to do something that’s going to be adverse to you and it’s irreparable, meaning you can’t go back in time and fix it.
That’s the basic idea behind ex parte relief. So in terms of ex parte relief, one thing is the person tried to remove property from the state. The other thing would be a situation where there’s going to be some sort of physical harm to somebody in the event that the court doesn’t act. It may or may not fit the definition of domestic violence, but somebody is going to be physically harmed if the court doesn’t intervene. The other point is when it comes to property of some sort. If there’s going to be irreparable harmed property, if the court does not intervene and do something. Let’s say that there’s something related to investments and if you don’t act immediately there’s going to be what we call a dissipation in that asset. Meaning the value is going to go significantly down if you don’t act in some way. It could be related to property, it could be related to physical harm and or it could be related to jurisdiction being deprived from West Virginia.
In those instances and others too, if you can meet the definition of immediate and irreparable harm being caused, it can fall outside of those things. These are just some clear examples that are specifically enumerated in the code. Those are some things to think about when it comes to your West Virginia divorce and emergency relief.
