Guardianship and Adoption: How to Keep Your Case Private
Are you in the middle of a guardianship or adoption case and are not sure about what, if anything, you should say about the case while it’s ongoing? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a family attorney in Tulsa and I’d like to give you some information on that. This advice is good and helpful for any type of case, but I’m focusing specifically on guardianships and adoptions because those are what we call closed proceedings.
What that means is that there’s no record available to the public. If you’re in the middle of a guardianship case and Bob from down the street wanted to go take a look at what had been filed, he couldn’t go to the courthouse and get access to those records, even if he had the case number. That information is only made available to the court, the attorneys, and the parties.
Importance of Maintaining Confidentiality
What should you do in this situation? The best thing for you to do is stay off social media and limit who you discuss the case with. I had a case a while back where my client, I think it was his mother-in-law, was trying to get guardianship over the kids and had gone on Facebook and made a bunch of posts about a couple conversations she had with her lawyer about their case strategy and about how he was going to do this, that, and the other and how she was going to try to pull this trick or that trick or whatever. My client found them because she put them on her public profile, brought them to me, absolutely tanked the other side’s case.
Stay Silent and Seek Legal Guidance
As a flip, I had a case years and years ago where I was trying to get guardianship from my clients and only to find out on the day of trial that they had been posting on a GoFundMe page about the case. Not just a, hey, we’re trying to get a guardianship, we’d really like some help. No, they posted details, photographs, specific allegations, everything that is not supposed to be made public record was put on display on the internet. The best advice that I can give is the simplest advice that anyone can give. If you’re unsure, just go ahead and stay silent, stay off social media, only discuss the case with your attorney.
Contact Us for a Strategy Session
If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to discuss an ongoing matter with a Tulsa adoption attorney, with Wirth Law Office, and you can find us at MakeLawEasy.com. For a low-cost initial strategy session, call a Tulsa attorney at 918-879-1681.
