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Stipulate initials request

hi everybody I'm Kyla I'm one of the MJC staff members and today I'm going to be walking you through how to fill out the caption which is this very top part of the stipulation to change form before we get started just a reminder as always that nothing in this video is intended to be legal advice so it is obviously a video and it can't tell you whether a stipulation is the right form for you to fill out whether a court will accept your stipulation or whether a stipulation makes sense or is in your best interest in your particular situation so if you have any of those questions we would recommend that you get legal advice if you're here in Milwaukee County you can get brief legal advice for free from the Marquette volunteer legal clinics if you're in another County we would recommend consulting with your local clerk of court or Family Court Commissioner's Office to see what resources are available to get help in your area alright so getting on to our form here the caption as I mentioned is the very top part of the stipulation form and it's pretty easy to fill in so this very top section right up here wants to know what county your case is located in what county your case comes out of so I'm gonna put Milwaukee County because that is the county where the justice center is located and where most of our cases come out oops made a little mistake there so we've got that this next portion wants to know what kind of case your order comes out of so if your order comes out of a divorce case you would want to check this marriage of box and if your case comes out of anything other than a divorce so if it came out of a paternity case where a court did DNA testing to determine who the child's father was or if it comes out of a case where somebody signed a voluntary acknowledgement of paternity or a support and maintenance case that has happened while you're married but no longer living in the same residence for any of those situations and really anything other than a divorce you're going to check this paternity box here if you check that paternity box you're going to put in the child's initials so in our case the child in the sample case is named Sally Smith so I'm going to put SS in that box the child's initials the next part we have here in the caption is this section that wants to get the information for the petitioner and the petitioner is always going to be the person whose name went first in your original case your original court filing so if it's a divorce case if your order comes out of a divorce case this is going to be the person who filed for divorce originally if you and your spouse filed together as joint petitioners this is going to be the person whose name was listed first on the original petition that you filed in your divorce and that person would have been joint petitioner a so you would have called them joint petitioner a all the way through if your case is a paternity case most of the time you're going to have the mom's name first and the dad's name second if you think that might not be true in your case or if you want to double-check you can always find out the order of the names by looking at the original summons and petition in your case or if you have a most recent order typically that will have the names in the correct order as well so here in our situation it follows the rule that most paternity cases do and the mom's name went first in the original filing so we're going to put mom's name on this line and that is Jane Doe and in our situation she's one we're just gonna put in a good mailing address for the petitioner here so it can be a Pio box it can be a street address just wherever the best place is for that person to receive mail and you'll put in a city and state as well and a good daytime phone number and then here in this line you're going to put in the respondents so that's just the other parent in your case in a divorce it's going to be the person who is served with the paperwork in a paternity case that's going to be the other parents so typically that's going to be dad but again if you aren't sure of that you can double-check your original order and in our case that's John Smith so I'm just going to enter his name and we'll enter a good mailing address for the respondent as well if you are filling these documents out on your own and you're going to take them to the other person to review and sign it's okay if you don't have the if you don't have their address with you you can have them handwrite in their address and we'll put in John's phone number here as well so we've got that there so then over here on the bottom section of the caption it wants to know if the state of Wisconsin is a party in this case and so if you're unsure if the state is a party in your case you can contact your local Child Support Agency and they can tell you whether the state is a party some other ways that you can find out if the state is a party in your case you can look at your last court order and see if it says that there was a representative from the state of Wisconsin there it might also say that your last order came because the state of Wisconsin filed a motion those things would be reasons that the state might be a party some other ways you might know if the state is a party is if the state has ever showed up at any of your hearings in the past if there's been a lawyer who says they represent the state of Wisconsin then the state is probably a party in your case the state could also be a party in any yeah a party in any situation where you have what we call assignable benefit and that's just fancy lawyer language for when someone receives specific state benefits that make the state a party so if somebody gets like w-2 child care or something like that so if you or the other parent in your case receive state benefits of any kind we would recommend contacting your local Child Support Agency to confirm whether or not those benefits are fall into that category of assignable benefits those benefits that would make this data party to the case so in our situation John and Jane do have a situation where the state is a party so we're gonna check that and then you have two more pieces to finish the caption over here on the right-hand side you can see we're gonna check whatever things we want to talk about with this document so I'm just gonna run through real quick what all of them are legal custody that's decision-making power here in Wisconsin so custody is just deciding where the child goes to school who their doctor is whether they can get married or join the military or any of those decisions that parents typically make about or for their children it doesn't have anything to do with where the children live and who they spend time with physical placement is what you check if what you want to talk about is where the children live who they spend time with when they and when they visit or spend time with the parent that they don't live with so that's all gonna fall under physical placement child support I think is pretty self-explanatory most people know what that is again it's just a monetary payment so a money payments made to help support minor children maintenance comes out of divorce cases it's spousal support it used to be called alimony and it again will only happen in divorce cases so if yours isn't a divorce case then you wouldn't have maintenance in your case family support just like maintenance family support only comes up in divorce cases and family support is a combination of child support and maintenance the last of our set categories here is arrears payment or rears balances arrears are back amounts of child support owed so if I owe say a hundred bucks a month in child support and I miss that payment for a couple of months I would owe arrears that's what we all that debt that I owe if you have something else that you want to include that doesn't fit into these categories you can check the other box the most common thing we see in this other box would be taxes so if people are wanting to talk about who claims the minor children on their taxes that could go there but if you have something else that you want to do that doesn't fit into the categories you could include that on that section as well I'm going to check for our purposes legal custody physical placement child support and the arrears balances because as I go through all of the sample videos we're going to do on our on our website you'll see that we're going to go through each of those sections that we see most commonly but you should know you only need to check the ones you want to talk about so if you and your the other parent your ex are just wanting to talk about our ears you only check arrears if you just want to talk about child support just check child support if you want to talk about placement in child support just check those two so you only need to check the ones you want to talk about so the very last thing we want to do to finish filling out this caption is to put in the case number and the case number is something that you can get from your local Child Support Agency and it's going to follow the format of it's going to be number number and then there'll be two letters either an F a or a P a and then there are going to be six numbers after the FA or the PA so for example in John and Jane's case they could be 18 PA 0 0 0 0 0 0 sometimes when you get this case number from your child support agency it will have two numbers on the front of that case number so here in Milwaukee you might get a case number that looks like 4 0 1 8 PA and what that 4 0 is is it's a county code so it tells the Child Support Agency what county the case is located in but since the courts only have access to their own counties records they don't have statewide records like the Child Support Agency you don't need to include that on the stipulation and in fact you don't want to include it so we'll go ahead and take that off some people will find at the end of their case number they have the letters PJ PJ stands for post judgment and if you have that PJ at the end of your case number you'll want to include it alright well that's it for filling in the caption hopefully this was helpful for you guys and if it's if it wasn't or if you have additional questions about how to fill in this section or other sections of the stipulation form then you can come into the Milwaukee Justice Center located in G 9 of the Milwaukee County Courthouse