Reading an order

An order is not written for you. It is written to be enforceable, which means it is written for a future judge who has never met either of you. That is why it reads the way it does, and it is why skimming it is dangerous: the sentence that puts you in contempt in eight months is rarely the sentence that sounds most important today.

Read it once for shape, then read it again with a pen, doing the four passes below.

The parts of an order

The practical version: find every paragraph that starts with IT IS ORDERED, and treat those as the whole document. Everything else is context. If something you were told would happen does not appear in one of those paragraphs, it was not ordered, however clearly you remember it being said.

First pass: every date

Go through with a highlighter and mark every date, deadline and time of day. Then put each one in a calendar with an alarm, and put a second alarm a week earlier.

• The date signed. At the bottom, by the signature. Many things are measured from the date the judge signed rather than the date you received it.
• Dates something must be done by. “Within thirty days” is a date; work out which one and write it down as a date.
• Recurring times. Exchange times, weekends, holiday schedules. These are where people fall foul without meaning to.
• Any next setting.

Second pass: every obligation, and whose it is

Go through again and, for each ordered paragraph, write in the margin two things: who has to do it, and what happens if they do not. Orders routinely place obligations on both parties and on people who are not parties at all.

Watch the verbs. Shall and is ordered to are mandatory. May is permissive — it gives someone a choice, and a choice is not a promise. Reading a may as a shall is one of the most common ways people end up feeling an order has been broken when it has not.

Pay particular attention to anything requiring you to provide something to the other party: notice of an address change, a school record, a receipt. Those are the obligations people forget they have, because they do not feel like court orders.

Third pass: what is missing

An order can only be enforced on what it says. Read for the gaps:

• Where does the exchange happen? An order with a time and no place is an argument waiting to happen.
• Who transports?
• What counts as notice, and how far in advance?
• What happens on a holiday that falls inside somebody’s weekend?

If a gap is going to cause a fight every month, that is worth raising sooner rather than living with. What you can do about it — modification, clarification, enforcement — is substantive law and it is not covered here; see the pointer at the foot of this page.

Fourth pass: does it match what was said?

Compare the order against your notes from the hearing. Drafted orders and spoken rulings come apart more often than people expect, usually through ordinary drafting error rather than anything sinister.

If it has not been signed yet, this is the moment — say what is different, specifically, before the judge signs. That is covered on what happens at a hearing.

If it has been signed and it does not match, do not simply act on what you remember being said. The signed order is what gets enforced. Getting a signed order changed is a procedure with its own deadlines, and the deadlines are shorter than people assume.

Get a copy that proves what it says

Make sure you hold a copy showing the judge’s signature and the date, and that the same document is on the docket. If you were handed a draft in the courtroom, that is not the filed version — check the docket a few days later and pull what was actually signed. Reading your own docket covers how.

Keep it somewhere you can reach in a hurry, along with your notes from the hearing. If an argument starts about what the order requires, the person who can produce the signed document in thirty seconds is in a much better position than the person who is sure they remember.