Methods of Discovery

Methods of discovery are important for you as a client to understand because I want to work in partnership with you to prepare your case and reach your litigation goals. There are 6 typical topics, or methods of discovery, that we use in divorce litigation. So if you can familiarize yourself with those, then you and I can have a meeting and discuss how you want to engage in discovery. Some discovery methods cost more than other discovery methods, so we want to be mindful that we're pursuing things that are tailored to meet your goals and are within your budget that you have for the divorce.

So the first thing I'm going to talk about is written discovery. Under the Missouri Rules of Civil Procedure, we can send to the opposing party what are called interrogatories and requests for production. Interrogatories are written questions that we're asking the opposing party to answer under oath. We are limited as to how many interrogatories that we can send.
The Missouri Revised Rules of Civil Procedure only permit us 25 interrogatories. We can also send requests for production. Those are requests where we can ask for bank statements, journals, anything that you, is a document that the other party is in possession of that you would like to have we can ask for. So written discovery is generally a less expensive way of gathering information that we need.

The second method that we have is we send subpoenas. Lots of different types of entities can be subpoenaed in a divorce case. We can get bank records, records of any kind of financial institution. It could be credit card records, retirement, any kind of asset record. We can gather employment records if we need to verify how much your spouse makes or what's in their employee 401(k) 401(k) plan or other types of compensation they have, even the, the work hours that they have. If there's schedule questions, we can subpoena those. We can subpoena medical records if there's any kind of medical discovery we can— we need to do. We can subpoena school records, police records, Children's Division records,

Any kind of record that we would need to prepare your case or gather information that we might not otherwise be able to receive, we can subpoena. Subpoenas can be another inexpensive way of gathering documents. They're— the cost is generally limited to the production of the subpoena by our office. You're going to have to pay a process server to take the subpoena and serve the subpoena. And sometimes the entities charge us for copies or records.

So, for instance, medical records, generally there's going to be a cost associated. We can limit the cost of a subpoena by letting the entity know if the cost is going to exceed a certain amount, they can let us know beforehand, and then you can decide if you want to go forward. Another method of discovery that is a very useful method is depositions.

Depositions would be where I formally interview a party or a witness we have a court reporter present, and they create a transcript of everything that we say. Depositions sometimes are necessary, but they are an additional expense because we have attorney time and we have court reporter costs. I would generally like to have a conversation with you about depositions, and then you can make a decision whether you think it's necessary. If it is a highly contested case, we almost always always are going to need depositions to prepare the case, or if our case is proceeding to trial because we're unable to resolve it, I'm generally going to recommend that we do depositions.

Another method of discovery that we use that's inexpensive would be you providing documents to us, or you providing information to us. The first thing that I would generally have you do is write a chronolog— chronological history of your relationship that details important events for me. This can be places you've lived, places you've worked, important events in the marriage, important conflicts you want me to be aware of, information with regard to your children. That is a document that you can prepare at no cost to you and provide to me, and I can have in my file as a resource, and also I can have in my file as a springboard to have discussions with you about other information that we need. Another method would be witness interviews. If you have people that have information related to a topic in your case, you can provide that information to me and give me their contact information so that I can have a discussion with them.

If you have witnesses that you'd like me to speak with, I prefer if you create a brief summary for me of what information you think they will have, how you think it will be helpful, and give me some idea of what you think they're going to say so that when I talk to them, I I can have an informed discussion about what, what we're talking about. The last method of discovery that's fairly typical would be obtaining experts. And that would generally be— experts can range anywhere from a real estate appraiser is considered an expert, a child psychologist is considered an expert.

So there are a wide variety of experts that we use in divorce litigation. Generally, expert selection is detailed, specifically to the needs of your case. Um, sometimes clients come to me initially and say, "What about getting an expert on a certain topic?" Sometimes I come to them, but be aware that experts could be necessary or could be a resource to you, and those would be under the umbrella of discovery.