Understanding Discovery in Divorce and Custody Cases
What is discovery? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a child custody attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma and I’ve been doing family and criminal law for about seven years now. I want to help you make law easy and explain the discovery process in a civil setting, specifically in a divorce or custody situation. So discovery is a really broad term. It’s basically how we gather evidence in the course of our case to help build our case to take it to trial.
It’s basically a giant fishing expedition in a lot of ways because if there’s things that we just don’t have enough information about or we need some documentation to back things up or if we’re demanding that the other side give us information to justify their claims, that’s what we do in discovery. There’s three types and that’s what I’m going to go over with today. The first type is interrogatories.
The Three Types of Discovery
Interrogatories are meant to be very broad and open-ended questions. One that I use in just about every family case that I have is identify and describe each and every positive and negative parenting trait that is exhibited by both you and by the other side. You don’t answer that in one or two questions. You don’t just say, Oh, I’m a great parent and they stink. It causes you to really sit down and kind of reflect like, Okay, how am I a good parent?
The next type of discovery is request for production. The request is a very polite way of saying it. It’s really a demand for production. You don’t get to just say no. I mean, an attorney could object to a request for production for a few different reasons, but for the most part, courts are going to require them to comply. These are where you are required to turn over documents.
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