• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 909 0

retirement account statements, and anything else that will provide information that you need to engage in an informed negotiation. But you should know that in some states, all documents that either of you turns over will become part of the public court record of your divorce case. If your spouse owns a business, the business might have a strong interest in keeping some of the information confidential. If there's no reason for you to want the material publicized, and for most people there isn't, you might offer to agree to a protective order that would keep the information out of the court record or from being passed on to other people not connected with your divorce. (That's called catching flies with honey instead of with vinegar.)

Requests for Admissions. These are written yes-or-no questions, where you ask your spouse to admit or deny certain facts. They are not used often in divorce cases, but can be useful. For example, you might ask your spouse to admit that as of the date of separation, the value of a certain asset was x amount. Once your spouse admits facts, you can use the response to challenge any contradictory testimony that comes up at trial.

Depositions. You can ask your spouse to appear and answer questions under oath about anything related to the divorce. You can also ask other people who have information about your marital finances to appear for questioning. Depositions take place in a lawyer's office (usually the lawyer who has requested the deposition), not in court, but the person being questioned is under oath, and everything said is taken down by a court reporter just as in a courtroom.

Subpoenas. You can get information and documents from peopleand institutions-who aren't directly involved in your divorce, like banks and credit card companies, using subpoenas.

Your lawyer will definitely want to take your spouse's deposition if you suspect that your spouse is hiding assets, or if your spouse took care of all the financial matters during your marriage and you don't know much about what's going on. You might also want to take your spouse's deposition if there are issues about whether certain property belongs to one of you separately or to both of you. For example, if your spouse claims you made a gift of an expensive piece of art work, and you are arguing that it's a jointly owned asset, you could use a deposition to ask your spouse to lay out all the facts that support the theory that the work was a gift and, thus, separately owned by your spouse.

Probably you and your spouse will both be called for depositions. But the most important depositions will be those of anyone you've hired-or anyone who's been appointed by the court to evaluate your kids and make a recommendation about what custody arrangement would be in their best interests. Chapter 7 addresses contested custody cases.

Is Your Spouse Hiding Assets?

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people in a divorce to try to hide assets. They may fail to disclose bank accounts, claim that an asset is less valuable than it really is, or make deceptive payments to a straw person to hide the money's location. Some of the most common ways that spouses hide assets from each other are:

• fudging the books of a business to make it look less valuable than it is, or to show more accounts payable or payroll obligations than the business actually has

• underreporting income on tax returns and financial statements

• failing to identify or disclose retirement accounts

• making secret agreements with employers to defer bonuses or pay increases until after the divorce is final; or, for someone who owns a business, delaying profitable deals or contracts

• "repaying" fake debts to friends or relatives, thus appearing to reduce assets, and

• putting friends or family on the payroll at work when they are not actually working (this has the dual benefit of increasing the business's expenses and allowing the asset-hiding spouse to retrieve the money later from the cooperative coconspirator).

If you think your spouse might be hiding assets, it's probably well