DivorceNet US State Divorce & Family Law Guide Scraper

Scrape DivorceNet.com — the Nolo/Internet Brands legal content network — for state-by-state divorce and family law guide articles covering all 50 US states plus DC. Returns one record per article with structured metadata and full body text.

What It Scrapes

DivorceNet.com publishes an extensive library of state-specific divorce guides covering:

• Residency requirements before filing
• Mandatory waiting periods
• Grounds for divorce (no-fault and fault-based)
• Alimony / spousal support rules by state
• Property division (community property vs. equitable distribution)
• The filing process and required court forms

Coverage: 215 /states/<state>/ articles across 34 states + 50 /topics/ hub articles = ~265 records total.

Output Fields

Field	Description
state	State name extracted from URL (e.g., "California")
page_title	Article headline
article_type	state_article or topic_article
residency_requirement	Sentence mentioning residency requirement (best-effort)
waiting_period	Sentence mentioning mandatory waiting period (best-effort)
grounds_summary	Sentence on no-fault or grounds for divorce (best-effort)
alimony_summary	Sentence on alimony/spousal support (best-effort)
property_division_summary	Sentence on property division (best-effort)
filing_process_summary	Sentence on how to file (best-effort)
body_text	Full article body text (up to 10,000 characters)
source_url	Original article URL

Note: The structured fields (residency_requirement, waiting_period, etc.) are extracted via keyword matching and are populated when the corresponding information appears in the article. Articles focused on a single topic will have other structured fields as null. The body_text field always carries the complete article content.

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of articles to scrape. Set to 0 for no limit (scrapes all ~265 matching articles).

Sample Output

{
  "state": "California",
  "page_title": "Dividing the Debts in a California Divorce",
  "article_type": "state_article",
  "residency_requirement": null,
  "waiting_period": null,
  "grounds_summary": null,
  "alimony_summary": null,
  "property_division_summary": "California is a community property state, meaning assets or debts acquired during marriage are generally considered jointly owned.",
  "filing_process_summary": "You can file for divorce yourself or have an attorney file the petition for divorce.",
  "body_text": "While there are some basic rules surrounding California divorce debt division...",
  "source_url": "https://www.divorcenet.com/states/california/dividing_the_debts_in_divorce"
}

How It Works

1. Fetches DivorceNet's XML sitemap (sitemap.xml, 1101 total URLs)
2. Filters to /states/ and /topics/ paths (~265 URLs)
3. Crawls each article page with CheerioCrawler (no proxy needed — server-rendered HTML)
4. Extracts body text from the #region-content Drupal content area
5. Applies regex-based sentence matching for structured fields

Use Cases

• Legal RAG datasets — feed state divorce law narratives into LLM legal Q&A systems
• Divorce SaaS and paralegal tools — enrich state-by-state process guides
• Content marketing — source authoritative state law summaries
• Research — compare divorce law across states

Technical Notes

• No proxy required — DivorceNet serves plain server-rendered HTML with no anti-bot measures
• Polite crawl rate (3-8 concurrent requests, rate-limit handling enabled)
• Full run (~265 articles) completes in a few minutes at default concurrency