Court Forms

The following is basic information you need to understand about court forms:

A divorce can be completed from start to finish by filling out various court forms and then filing those forms with the court clerk.

You can also obtain domestic violence restraining orders by filling out court forms and filing the forms with the court clerk.

Things get done in the court system with forms. The court forms are known as Judicial Council forms.  They were created by the State of California.  Their use is mandatory.

We provide you with all of the forms you will need for free.   The forms are contained in our Court Forms Database.  All of the forms are fillable. You can find any form you need in our database, fill out the form, save it, print it, and then file it with the court.

Each court form has a name and also a form number.  For example, a Petition For Dissolution of Marriage is known as FL-100.  The “FL” stands for family law.  A Request For Domestic Violence Restraining Orders is known as DV-100.  The “DV” stands for domestic violence.  On our website, we will always give you both the name of each form and the form number.  In each section of our website where we discuss a particular court form, we first give you the name of the form, but we then primarily refer to the form by its number.

Our Court Forms Database is organized by groups of forms and then by the form number.  All the Family law forms, which are “FL” forms, are grouped together.  All the domestic violence forms, which are “DV” forms, are grouped together.  Each group of forms is listed in numerical order.  When you are looking in our forms database, use the form number and that will make it easy for you to find that particular form.

Any time you need a court form, click the “Court Forms” button on the homepage of our website and it will take you to our forms database.

For many of the court forms, we give you not only a blank fillable version, but also a completed version as a sample.  Blank forms that you can fill out and print are listed in our database as “Blank” while completed versions of the form are listed as “Completed”.

You are not required to type up the forms.  If you wish, you can print the blank versions of the forms from our database and then fill them out with a pen so long as your writing is legible.  The court will accept forms that are filled out with a pen.

You should click here at this time and take a look at our Court Forms Database so you can see how it is organized.  You can click on any form, have it pop up, and see how easy it is to fill out the form.  Depending on your browser or the type of device you are using to view our site, it may take up to 30 seconds for the form to pop up, so be patient.

If you are looking at a court form, the number of the form can always be found at the top of the page.

Our Court Forms Database contains over one hundred forms.  There many hundreds of Judicial Council forms in existence, most of which have nothing to do with divorce or family law.  We have included in our database all of the forms we think the vast majority of people will need.  However, if you find you need a particular court form that is not in our database, you can Google “California Judicial Council” and on that government website, you can find every Judicial Council form that exists.

One final note.  Some of the Judicial Council forms exist in different languages.  For example, the Petition For Dissolution of Marriage, FL-100, can be found on the Judicial Council website in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.  We did not include these translated forms in our database for a number of reasons.  The court will only accept forms that are in English.  There are a very limited number of forms that have been translated.  We felt inclusion of the translated versions in our database would create confusion.