One of the most often seen issues in Family Law, are the law and motion hearings on reducing support, increasing support or elimination of support. Unfortunately in California, most parents are aware that the support formula for calculating support is tied to the visitation.
Increasingly, more fathers are attempting to maintain their rights to their children, which is good for the children in general. However, a pro se client attempting to reduce support usually will have a difficult time unless there are obvious factors for the Court to plainly reduce or eliminate.
In general, your evidence is controlling if you already know the rules or law. If you don't know the rules or law, it's best to go research it before trying to turn in your documents. It is pretty useless to make an argument using the wrong law, but with online articles and Findlaw, you can usually find almost any case or law unless it just came out yesterday. Also generic Google searches will often turn up scholar articles from law reviews and prestige colleges that not everyone has read.
Because law and motion is a limited time frame, any issues which exceed 15 minutes (in Sacramento, for example) --- are to be heard on a different hearing basis, a long cause hearing, which will take more time for the Court. In Butte County, in excess of 20 minutes. Butte County has quite a few local rules involving Family Law which can be seen by looking at the Butte County Superior Court website and then finding the box for Local Rules.
For example, if a case had been continued or not, but they failed to record that, so you show up and your case isn't on the calendar. Or, you had related cases and one case is not linked to the other cases and you didn't even know it was missing. Or, a case has a hearing but it is not even listed. But you show up and no one else is there. It is a good idea to call the court several days ahead to ensure your motion is actually on the calendar.
Some calendars are horribly long, and some are quite short. TRAC calendars can be awfully long, awfully crowded, and a big waste of time. We think Butte County might be one of the few, or the only county, that does not set for trial by using a computer driven date system.
In Sacramento, you can't select a trial date, you can only select a specific date as being unavailable. The computer sets up all dates after parties have eliminated their UNavailable dates, which makes sense.
And you cannot keep doing it over again (in Butte you can to some extent if the other party after 4 months never has an available date, that is pretty bad.)
Also in Sacramento, most cases are settled at the Mandatory Settlement Conferences, thus creating less work for the courtrooms. Pro tems are used at mandatory settlement which forces the parties to some extent, to cut their losses by agreeing on some things for a change.
