I didn’t change my name when I got divorced but now, I want to. What should I do?

When people get married, they often times will choose to share a last name, and one spouse will change their last name to the others’. When it is time to get divorced, the spouse who changed their name can ask the court to give them permission to return to their former name.

There are a variety of reasons why people choose not to do so at the time of divorce but sometimes, down the road, they wish they did. Luckily, there are a few options on how to address this depending on how far you are from the date of the actual divorce.

Option #1: Following the date of the Judgment of Divorce, you have 30 days in which you would be able to file a request to amend and/or alter the judgment and ask the court to return you to your former name. The court normally grants these requests as long as you have testified that you are not trying to return to your former name for any illegal, immoral, or fraudulent purposes and you are not trying to change your name to avoid any creditors or the IRS. If this testimony was not taken at the divorce hearing but you are filing a request, you will likely need to include an affidavit verifying these things.

Option #2: If you did not request to be restored to your former name during the divorce and missed the 30-day window, you can make this request for up to 18 months after the final judgment of divorce. You will be able to file this request directly within your divorce case and this process is very similar to that of option #1 above.

Option #3: If 18 months have passed since your divorce, you can still file a petition for a name change through the court system as a new case and it is a fairly simple process. You will need to file the Petition in the circuit court in the county you reside. In the petition you will need to verify that you are not trying to return to your former name for any illegal, immoral, or fraudulent purposes and you are not trying to change your name to avoid any creditors or the IRS. You will then need to attach accompanying documents verifying your current name and provide the court with the full name you wish to now have. Once this is filed, anyone has 30 days to object (which is rare). If someone opposes your request for a name change, they can file an objection to the petition, and you will have 15 days to respond to that. At that point, the court may or may not set the matter in for a hearing.

Without an objection being filed, and so long as you filed all of the necessary paperwork, the court should grant your name change after 30 days have expired without the need for a hearing.

Once you have a court order granting your name change through any of the options above, you can then take that court order to the MVA, social security office, etc. to change your name on your government documents and the like. Of note, options #1 and #2 only allow you to return to a former name whereas option #3 allows you to change your name to whatever you would like regardless of if it is a former name or something brand new.

If you have any further questions about a name change, the attorneys at Weinberg & Schwartz, LLC would be happy to help! Please reach out at 410-997-0203.