Okay, so we have your petition or your answer and counterpetition on file with the court. What do we do next? It's a process that lawyers call discovery, and what that means is gathering information that we need to prepare your case. In a divorce, there's going to be various topics of information that we need to gather, and there's different ways that we can do that. I like to think of a divorce in topics.
So your topics would be division of property and debt, maintenance, if we're seeking spousal support or we have a spouse that's seeking support, child custody, which is your parenting plan, child support, and attorney's fees. Those are the 5 topics that the court generally is going to be making orders on, resolving, or gathering, or providing. —providing relief in, in a divorce case.
So for each of those topics, we will need to gather specific information tailored to meet your goals. If you have a complicated or even an uncomplicated asset and debt situation, we need to value all of your assets. We need to value all of your debts. That's how we come up with a division for you and your spouse of what we're proposing to divide your assets and debts.
If you have children and we're dealing with child custody, we're going to need to develop a parenting plan. We're going to need to have a proposal as to the physical custody of your children and the legal custody of your children. So depending on what your litigation goals are for custody, we need to gather information designed to support that. If you are seeking attorney's fees, then there is a statute with regard to attorney's fees that tell us the factors that the court's going to look at.
We're going to gather evidence that's going to support that. If you have children that we are making orders with regard to support of, then we're going to need to look— gather information related to those factors. We might need to know how much your health insurance for your children costs, how much your daycare for your children costs, um, what extracurriculars they're involved in and how much those cost on a regular basis. So, when you think of discovery, which is a fancy legal term, All that means is gathering information necessary to meet your litigation goals.