SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to the Texas Family Lawyer podcast. I'm Alex Hunt of Hunt Law Firm, a family law firm with offices in Katy, League City, Cyprus, and Sugarland. And today I am happy to have with me our senior paralegal at Hunt Law Firm, Melissa Tubbs. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Thank you.

What Discovery Really Is

SPEAKER_00 0:21

All right, today is a very special episode because we're going to be talking about Discovery, everything that our clients need to know and the advice that we give to them on how to properly answer discovery. And then something I think our viewers will like, we're going to talk about the top eight ways that you can save some money when your lawyers are answering discovery and how you can help us out. So let's jump right in. Melissa, our first question is about discovery and Texas divorce, interrogatories, requests for production, and depositions explained. Give us an overview of what discovery is.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Discovery is essentially the fact-finding process in your divorce case. It's where we are going to obtain as much documentation as possible, some answers to some questions related to the things that you're dealing with in your in your divorce, whether it be financials, child custody issues, things like that. It's a set of different questions that are being asked and documents that are being requested that we're gathering to then provide to the other side so that we can figure out what the issues are and where we stand.

Written Discovery Tools Explained

SPEAKER_00 1:35

And there's multiple different types of discovery. And the the ones that we usually start with are written discovery tools. And that's where you do a lot of work and you've developed a beautiful system for our firm for efficiently answering discovery. Those four most common types of written discovery are request for disclosure, request for production, interrogatories, and request for admissions. So let's take each of those kind of one by one. Request for disclosure. These are really lawyer-led questions and lawyer-led answers. These are things that have to do with who the parties are in the case, what the approach is, what the defenses are, what the damages are, things like that. Request for production is where our paralegal team does a lot of work in supporting a lot more cost-effectively our attorneys in answering discovery. Tell us a little bit about what a request for production is.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

A request for production is going to be the request for all of the documentation. So a lot of times we're seeing questions about financials, retirement, bank accounts, credit cards, assets, debts, liabilities. It's also going to have questions related to the child custody issues. So it's where the parties have a chance to provide all the information they have related to their kids, communications with schools, doctors, things like that. It's very document heavy. Some cases have tons, like tens of thousands of pages of documents related to a request for production, and some have a lot less than that. It kind of just depends on your case and your estate and your kids.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

And requests for admissions, we don't use these in every case, but these are kind of like a truefalse question that you ask to the other side, and you can ask as many as you need to. And they simply list a statement, and then they uh the person that receives it, it has to say admit or deny. And there's a limited number of objections that you can make to these. Um, but for example, you know, you own a white four Taurus, admit or deny. Um, the and the questions can be a little bit more complicated, uh, and the questions can go into the facts of the case to try to narrow down some of the issues. The final tool that we use are called interrogatories. Tell us a bit about those.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Written interrogatories, we have a limit of 25 that we can ask in a Texas divorce case. Um, those can vary in what they're asking. Um, same thing though, a lot of times they're focused mostly on financials and then the child custody things. They can be they're usually more narrowed. Um, sometimes they have subparts. It's really important that if you're answering inter interrogatories, you are answering all the subparts to the questions. Um but each case is a little bit different and and what they're asking for. But we usually are requesting that the client provide us a lot of feedback on the interrogatories because it's it's their life, it's their case. We need their input.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

And and the interrogatory responses, we guide our clients through those responses, but they do the first draft, and then we'll help them with some of the kind of uh, you know, we critique it, we revise it a bit, we add some of the legalese that might be necessary.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Semantics.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

But but they're the ones that are driving the answers, and and that's really important.

Production Requests And Child Issues

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Aaron Powell We try to make them in charge of that as much as possible. And then I, you know, make them feel better by reiterating that yes, the attorneys are going to review this, look at it, make sure that it sounds good, make sure that you're not saying anything that, you know, you don't want to be saying in these interrogatories because they can be used later on in court in your case if if it gets to that point.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

And so when we issue discovery, the other side has 30 days to respond to us. When we are issued discovery, we have 30 days to respond. And we need a lot of stuff to happen in those 30 days. And so we've got systems in place to be as efficient as possible. And so that's why we ask for our clients to give us the documents maybe after about two weeks, so that way we can do our work in fashioning the responses to the clients. What tell walk me through the process um of what we need to answer those um discovery requests.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Um I need the client to you know review the discovery request in detail, send me any documents that are responsive to those requests. Um I usually tell them the more the better. I would rather you send me more information than what I need, and we can kind of fish through what is actually responsive if if they're not sure. Um I need complete documentation. So if we're talking about bank statements or something like that, I need the full bank statement, not just one page, not just two pages. A lot of times your bank statements are, you know, seven to ten pages. I need I need every single page of the bank statement. Everything's got to be complete.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

So, Melissa, our next question is how to help your lawyer answer discovery in a Texas divorce. This is something that we go over with our clients, and helping to answer discovery appropriately is something that uh you and our paralegal team takes a very uh heavy role in. So when walk us through the process, we receive the discovery requests from the other side. They're asking us written questions and interrogatories, they're asking us for documents in a request for production. They've done a request for disclosure. What happens next in our process and what do you need from clients?

Admissions And Interrogatories Basics

SPEAKER_01 7:31

As soon as we receive discovery requests, um, the first thing I'm doing is I'm gonna calendar that deadline that we need to respond. I'm gonna communicate, we've got a letter that we actually send clients that's very detailed about this is what we received, this is the type of discovery requests that we've been served with, this is the deadline that we have to respond to them, this is when I need documents back from you. Um, like you said earlier, we try to give clients like two weeks from the day we were served with the discovery request to send us all documentation. That ensures that we have an additional two weeks to look through everything, get everything organized, um finalize our answers and get it served on opposing counsel by that 30-day deadline. Um I'm also in the meantime working on um drafting our responses and getting a Word document ready to go. I'm asking the client to send us those answers to the interrogatories or at least a first draft to get them to send us as much information as possible on those, and then obtaining all of those documents. Um for the request for production, it's usually pretty document-heavy. Again, we're looking at financials and child custody issues usually. Um, so bank statements, credit card statements, loan statements, um, for the kid issues. Again, it's communications with schools a lot of times, stuff with their doctor's appointments, things like that.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

And a lot of times our clients can get overwhelmed with this process. I mean, we're asking them sometimes requests for production can be 70 or 80 questions, asking for every aspect of your marital relationship, your financial life, your you know, child custody questions, and they get that, and then they get 25 interwritten interogatories that they have to answer, and then they have requests for disclosure, and then they could have an unlimited amount of requests for admissions. So, how do you walk clients through that process and uh you know help them keep calm, help them stay uh eye on the ball?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

I guess for like when they kind of are freaking out about discovery, I explain that almost all cases go through this process and we see this stuff every single day. So we're here to explain it to you, walk, walk through it with you. Um we set meetings if we need to to like go over it. But a lot of times we can do it over the phone. And I just explain to them like these requests are in attorney lingo sometimes. Right. Um, let's break it down. Look at let's look at this question, what's it asking for? And then we just read through it and and try to figure out what they have in their estate that's responsive to that particular request.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

And what I always tell my clients is, you know, yeah, they might ask, you know, 25 written interrogatory questions, but if you don't know the answer, you just say that you don't know the answer. Or if they ask you for 80 different sets of documents, but you don't have those documents, then we have a way to answer that appropriately. And we just say that you don't have it. And that's okay. Um, and you don't have an obligation to necessarily go and create all those documents or find all of those documents. Um, so it's gonna be okay. And and and people do this uh all the time. And um they have the the guidance of our paralegal team and of course our attorneys. So once we get that information from our clients, what is the next step in the process?

Deadlines And Firm Workflow

SPEAKER_01 10:54

The next step for us, once they send in all of their documentation, I'm going to take time to look through it and figure out do I think we have everything that this client has? Did they send us all of their accounts? Usually people, it's pretty easy to look at a set of documents and figure out if things are missing. For example, I'm usually looking for at least one savings account, one checking account, because that's pretty normal for what typical people have. Um and if I'm not seeing one of those things, I'm gonna reach out to the client and say, Hey, I noticed you didn't send me any documents for any sort of checking account. Do you have a checking account? Right. And they're like, Oh yeah, I do. I'm like, oh yeah, send that to me. They're they're asking for it. So that's the whole point of giving them the two weeks from the date we receive the request to give those documents because then that gives us time to look through everything and make sure that we are being as compliant as possible and responding um as thoroughly as possible to the requests. Um I'm also going to look and make sure that everything is complete and responsive to the requests.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah. And and at that point, the the file kind of gets handed over to the attorney to start fashioning the answers. Um and I know that the paralegal team sets us up for success. Uh, you know, the documents are organized and, you know, all of the documents are accumulated, but now it's time to start taking the questions and plugging in the answers. And part of that process might be objecting to the question because they're looking for something that's irrelevant, or they're going on a fishing expedition and they're looking for something that doesn't have anything to do with the case. And we would start, or they're asking for something that's privileged, or they're asking for something that is an invasion of the person's privacy. So all of those objections that would that would uh be drafted by the lawyer, and then they would form the answer, and then the file kind of comes back to the paralegal team to serve the answers on the other side. Tell us about what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

So once all of the documents are organized and the attorney has put in the answers to the different responses, um, we do something called Bates labeling the documents, which means we put a little identification number essentially on the document so that we can identify that. Identify it. Yeah, and and make sure that everyone's talking about the same document if it ever gets to that point. Um and then I am putting it together in a file to serve on opposing counsel. Um we're gonna serve them with the actual responses to their requests for the different discovery. Um, and I'm also going to provide them with a copy of all of the documents with the baits labels on it.

Client Tasks And Complete Documents

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Very good. And, you know, I I know that we do all of that digitally. We use Adobe PDF. Back in the day, they used to have an actual bait stamp where they would take, I couldn't imagine doing this in our cases where we've got 8,000 pages, but they literally stamp it and it moves to number two. They stamp it and moves to number three. And thankfully we have the benefit of technology to help us with that. But but overall, the process um led by our paralegal team and organizing and obtaining those documents makes it so much easier for our clients, makes it so much more cost effective for our clients. And uh, you know, as an attorney, it it truly makes this process so much easier. And so I know I appreciate it and the clients appreciate it as well. All right. Our next question, Melissa, we're gonna discuss the top eight ways to save money in your Texas divorce. And this one is our Discovery Edition. So we're gonna talk about um eight things that you can do if you're going through a divorce or a child custody case, any type of family law matter, that you can make things a little bit easier for us, which will save you money in the long run. So let's start with number one. And that's read the request and only send what is responsive.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

And I know I said earlier, send me as much as possible, but within the realm of reality, I mean, I, you know, look at the requests, read them. If you take a second to just look at it word for word, it's pretty easy to figure out what they're asking for. Do you have it or do you not? Send me what is responsive to that request. If it's asking for credit card statements, send me your credit card statements. I don't need more than your credit card statements.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

And send only what they are asking for, and you only need to send it once. Yeah. Because if you send it multiple times or you send it in multiple formats, then we have to look through it uh every time and we have to decipher whether that's a a repeat or duplicate.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

So number two, send it as a PDF.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

PDF is preferred. Um, that's the way it's gonna get sent out. So if I don't have to spend time converting it to a PDF, that's gonna save a little bit of time, um, especially when we're dealing with thousands of documents at a in a given setting. Um PDF is best.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Aaron Ross Powell And PDF is the way that we are going to send it out. So if we get it in that format, it's gonna make it a lot easier. And then one thing we talked about in in you know, as we were preparing for this was that sometimes uh with certain banks, which I won't name, they will password protect every single PDF bank statement, which makes it impossible to then do discovery.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah, there are a few banks that happen to do that. Tax returns also a lot of times come password protected from whoever your tax preparer is. That's a really common one that we see that's password protected. Um, a lot of times the client can remove that password if if they know that it's password protected. We have ways of kind of figuring out how to remove the password, but it's easier if it comes to us without a password on it.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Yeah. And it's time consuming. We kind of have to do them one at a time.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Aaron Powell And I have found out sometimes at the last minute that a document is password protected because it won't let us baits label if it's password protected.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

So all right. The number three way to save money in your uh Texas divorce with Discovery is to make sure it's complete. What do we mean by that?

Organizing, Objections, And Service

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Complete meaning um, again, back to the bank statements. A lot of times bank statements are six, seven, eight, nine, ten pages, something like that. Um I need the I need the complete statement. All the pages, a lot of times they have the the numbers at the bottom and it'll say page one of eight. I need eight pages of the statement. If I find out later on that it's not complete, chances are opposing counsel's gonna squawk about that and we're gonna have to redo it.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

But what if the eighth page is just a blank page and it doesn't have any information on it?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

It's gotta be complete. That's the rule. It has to be.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

And I can tell you as an attorney, if I'm getting something that says that it's eight pages, but I only get seven of the eight pages, I'm typically not thinking, well, they were just saving some trees and they were just leaving it out. I'm thinking they're hiding something. Right. So even if it's a blank page or it's one of those pages that says this page is meant to be intentionally blank, it's gotta go. Include it. Yeah. Because the other side's gonna expect that. I know I certainly would. All right. Number four, organize everything for us. How how what's the best way for clients to do that for us?

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Like you said, most of this stuff is done digitally. Um, one of the best ways I can think to organize things is to use folders when you're sending it to me, whether you're sending it over our online platform Clio or um you're sharing like a Google Drive with us or something like that. If you can put things into subfolders and keep, you know, all of your bank statements for one account together, all of the bank statements for your savings account together, all of the credit card statements together, that that's huge because what if it's organized like that already? Um I just I don't have to fish through every single statement and and put it all together. We send it out in a particular way that's organized and the questions are usually grouped in a certain way. So if you can already have that piece done, that'll save a lot of time. It sounds simple, but it it saves a lot of time.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

No, certainly. And we also tell all of our clients, we give them the the naming conventions for how we like these things named. And one of the ways that it helps us organize them so then it's easier in the discovery process, but also if we're accessing the documents in a hearing or in a trial, is we start with the date and it's year, month, day, so that everything is in all date order. Yeah. And um, and then we put the name of the document, we put the client's last name so everything is searchable. And we give clients those naming conventions. Some of them take advantage of it, but we're going to put it in that naming convention because if we're in trial, we don't want to be fumbling around with a whole bunch of documents that are completely unorganized. We want to be ready to go. And so if clients can do that on the front end, that's going to help us immeasurably with organization.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

It's huge. And it it makes it really easy to figure out, you know, if they're asking for bank statements all the way back to 2020 or something like that, you know, the last five years. It's easy for me to see do I have five years worth of bank statements if they are already named and organized that way. And I can correct an issue if I see a statement missing really quickly, as opposed to having to look through every single document and find out later that we don't have something.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

So something that's a bigger part of our uh life text messages, screenshots. We're seeing more and more of these. Um, they should have informate certain information on those to ensure that they are admissible in court. Tell me what we need.

Eight Ways To Save Money

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Um for text messages, we definitely need the phone number of the person that you're texting with. Um so a lot of times we advise clients to remove the contact name from their phone so that the phone number is what is showing up at the top. That just shows that you're communicating with that particular number and not somebody else under the guise of being somebody different. Um we also need the date to be on the text message and the a timestamp if possible. All of those things together is what makes a text message admissible in court. Um if it's a text message thread, so multiple text messages going back and forth between two people, we need the thread to be complete. So um when it comes to screenshotting text messages, if if that's going to be the way that you're submitting those to us. Um I tell clients, you know, I need a date at the very top. The very first message needs to be dated with a timestamp if possible. And then every message under that needs to be in order. The last text message on a screenshot needs to be the first text message on the next screenshot. That just makes it to where there's no there's no guessing. Everyone can see that it's a fluid thread and there's not a text message that's been omitted for whatever reason. For the same reason you just said, you're gonna assume that if it's omitted, it's because you're trying to hide something. And that's not usually the case and that's not intentional, but that's how you can kind of and I would say that you want it to be as complete as possible.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

And I'm not saying that if you have a text message thread with your husband or wife that you need to have every text message. You've ever sent them. But you should have, if you're going to produce something, the complete conversation, the complete thought, because you might produce a text message where he's calling you a name, but you don't see the three text messages before that where you called him a name. So you need to have a complete thought. And that could actually get a message excluded in court if you don't uh have uh the complete document. The other thing that can help you with this is there's a number of tools that we use. Um and it can help you extract your text messages in a in a very um user-friendly way where we get a PDF printout of everything, and it's got a screenshot and it's got the phone number on every single text message and on every single page. And so that's something that we can help walk our clients through, or we can actually do it for them. And um the next one, number five, would be clean scans. What uh and so so by that what we mean is um, you know, things that are uh blurry or um, you know, you can't really make them out, but it's more than that. What what else do you not like seeing in documents that are produced by our clients?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

I don't want any highlighting. I don't want any notes, I don't want anything like that on the document. For example, um sometimes we get like utility bills from clients and things like that, something that they maybe received in the mail and it was a you know a paper copy and they've written something on there, like I paid this on whatever date. We don't we don't want to see those kinds of notations on your documents if we can help it. Um so don't don't highlight on don't highlight on it, don't write on it, don't circle things, don't none of that. It needs to be the document as it was produced by whatever entity it's for and number seven is keep the lines of communication open.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Don't make us track you down to get the documents. So tell us a little bit about uh what you like to see in terms of communication.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

So when we're receiving again the the document or being the discovery requests from the other side and I'm sending them to you, I'm giving you that two-week deadline to provide me with all of your responsive documents and your answers. Um, if we're getting close to that deadline and you maybe need another day or two, just let me know that so that I can know when to expect that stuff for you. We are prioritizing things with other cases on our end. So I need to know kind of when we're gonna get those documents for you so I can fit it into our schedule of when we're gonna review it and when we're gonna go through everything and things like that. But if we're not hearing from the client at all, it just makes us kind of start to start to worry a little bit and then the timeline gets tight, and then all of a sudden we're we're cramming at the very end to get all of this stuff out, and it can be pretty stressful.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Right. And we want to get it done right for them. Right. So the last one, number eight, is to start early. Um, and this is then probably should have been number one because um, you know, you've got 30 days, and it's a very limited timeline in order to get these answers and documents from the client to us. We process it, we do the answers, and we get it to the other side. And if you as a client are getting us information on day 29, you are setting up an impossible task for the attorneys.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Setting us up for failure. It makes it really hard. Again, we're cramming uh more likely to make a mistake because we're just trying to get everything done so quickly. We want to be able to look at everything and make sure that we know exactly what's being sent out. We want it to be organized, not not only as just like a courtesy to the other side, but for us too. We're gonna be using these documents later on down the road.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

And we want everything to be as organized and and it's and it's more likely to run up the cost too, because if you give it to us on day 29, it's not gonna be possible for one person to work on that and get it done. Yeah. We're probably going to have to take people off of other cases and get the entire team working on it, and then you're gonna be paying that cost as the client as well. So getting it started as early as possible is going to be a best practice uh when it comes to discovery.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Well, Melissa, I think we covered it all. We talked about the discovery process, um, your process uh that you've developed for our team at Hunt Law Firm and some ways to save some money. And so if anybody out there is going through a family law case, a divorce, uh child custody matter, um they're certainly welcome to come and talk to us. You could find us at family lawyerkatie.com. Please like and subscribe this YouTube video if you're watching on YouTube or subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. We'll see you in the next one.