A parent or spouse has died
The first thing to know is that not every estate goes through probate, and a good share of the ones people worry about do not. If the accounts had a named beneficiary, if the house was titled with a right of survivorship, if the whole estate is under the small estate threshold, most of it moves without a court file at all.
What decides it is the paperwork the deceased signed years ago, not the size of the estate. So the first meeting is mostly reading, and it is short. If probate is needed we open it in the Ray County circuit court, and the usual case takes the better part of a year, most of which is a waiting period the statute sets and nobody can shorten.
What happens first. Do not close accounts, do not sell the car and do not distribute anything to family, however clearly it was promised. Undoing a distribution is the expensive part.
Call (816) 555-0105.
You have been served with papers
There is a date on the front of what you were handed and it is a real deadline. Missing it does not mean you lose the argument on the merits, it means the argument never happens and the other side gets what they asked for. That is the single most common way a manageable case becomes an unmanageable one.
Bring the papers in the envelope they came in. The envelope matters, because when service was made is sometimes the whole question.
What happens first. Call the same week, not the week the deadline falls. An answer filed with three days to spare costs the same as one filed with three weeks, but only one of them leaves room to negotiate.
Call (816) 555-0105.
You are getting divorced
Missouri is a no fault state, so the question is not who was at fault. It is three practical ones: what is there, who has the children when, and what does support look like. An uncontested divorce where both people have already agreed is a filing, a thirty day waiting period, and a short hearing. A contested one is a different animal and takes as long as the slower of the two people takes.
You will be asked for an income and expense statement and a property statement early on. Filling those in honestly and completely at the start shortens everything after it, and most of the delay in a family case comes from documents that were promised and not sent.
What happens first. Do not move out of the house or take the children out of the county before you have talked to somebody. Both are reversible, but both change the shape of the case.
Call (816) 555-0105.
Custody or child support needs changing
An order can be modified, but not because the arrangement has quietly stopped matching real life. The court is looking for a substantial and continuing change in circumstances: a move, a job that changed the schedule, a child whose needs are different at fourteen than they were at six, a parent who is not exercising the time they were given.
Support is recalculated on a state form, and the inputs are both incomes, the overnight count and who pays for health insurance and childcare. If any of those four have changed, the number probably has too.
What happens first. Start keeping a plain calendar of who actually had the children each night. Not a diary, a calendar. It is the most useful document in a modification case and nobody ever has one.
Call (816) 555-0105.
You need a will, or a power of attorney
For most families in this county the useful set is four documents, not one: a will, a durable power of attorney for finances, a health care directive, and a beneficiary deed on the house. The last one is the quiet workhorse. A beneficiary deed moves the property at death without probate, it costs very little, and it is undone at any time by the person who signed it.
A trust is the right answer for some people and an expensive answer for most. If a trust is not going to earn its keep in your situation, you will be told that.
What happens first. Decide who you would want making medical decisions if you could not. That is the only question in this whole area people find genuinely hard, and everything else follows quickly once it is answered.
Call (816) 555-0105.
You are adopting a stepchild or a grandchild
Stepparent and grandparent adoptions are the part of this practice that ends well, and they are worth doing properly. The hinge is almost always the other biological parent: whether they will consent, and if they will not, whether their rights can be terminated on the facts. That question decides whether the case takes four months or eighteen.
A home study is usually required and is arranged early, because it is the item most likely to hold the file up. Adult adoptions, which happen more often than people think, are considerably simpler.
What happens first. Say nothing to the child about a court date until there is one. These cases move on somebody else's timetable more than any other kind.
Call (816) 555-0105.