After the divorce is Final

Neither my husband nor I had an attorney for our divorce. I was struggling with major depression and he took advantage of that situation and filed for a divorce through a paralegal, taking everything we worked for together for 20 years, and making me responsible for over 1/2 of the bills we accumulated in our marriage. I was not able to afford legal representation and was not in the state of mind to make major life decisions like that on my own. There were no minor children involved. The divorce is now final. I live in California, is there anything I can do at this point, or when a divorce is final is there nothing else you can do at that point?

You have 30 days to appeal a decree in a divorce.

However, if you signed a settlement agreement, which specified the terms, your chances of getting that tossed out are slim and none.

If the decision was made by the court after a final hearing, your chances of winning on appeal are still pretty slim. Why?

The appeals court will NOT reweigh either the evidence or the credibility of the witnesses. It will look only to see whether there were procedural problems in the trial process itself that denied you a fair trial.

Even if an error is found at the trial level, the appeals court has an uncanny way of calling the error "harmless" and using that as a reason not to overturn the decision.

Also, you are pretty much stuck w/focusing on the issues in which you objected on the record (unless you can prove something was a fundamental error that you failed to object to).

You cannot introduce new evidence (unless it was newly discovered and could not have been discovered at the time of trial), either.

Sorry, to be the wet blanket here.....

There was no court trial, I never saw a judge, never had a court appearance date. The paralegal filled out divorce papers on dec 17th and I got legal separaion papers a couple months later and final divorce papers in the mail on June 6th. Even if I had gone to court what would I have told the judge? That I have no means of getting a lawyer so everything we worked for should go to him?
callmeagiver