A Brooklyn divorce evidence attorney is the professional that you will be in constant communication with over the dissolution of your marriage. Whether you are fighting over division of property or assets, child support, spousal support or custody, having the appropriate evidence to support your case in court can have a significant impact on the overall outcome of your case.
Your argument is of utmost importance and it should only be handled directly by an experienced Brooklyn divorce evidence attorney. A divorce evidence attorney in Brooklyn will help you understand all of the various issues that may be decided via settlement agreement with you and your former spouse outside of court or through the courts directly in a trial.
Only certain types of evidence are allowed to be admitted into court and a clear understanding of this will assist you with the pursuit of justice. Testimony is one common example of evidence. Depositions may be held when a witness has extenuating circumstances such as a pending death, travel out of the country or had bad health and cannot make it to court.
In all other cases the witness will need to come to court to testify. It's important to remember that hearsay is not evidence. What someone else told you cannot be admitted unless you are married to that person. Testimony about what a spouse said could is an exception to the general hearsay rule in the New York courts.
You may be able to testify if you are separating on fault-based grounds in New York and you are sharing a concern that your spouse told you that he or she had an affair. One of the most common pieces of evidence in a New York divorce case has to do with documentation.
In custody disagreements, you will need to produce records from the child’s school and records from the child’s doctor. You should have records of who is paying the medical bills and who takes the child to doctor’s visits. When requesting spousal support, you will need to show expenditures and income via bank records. This information should be gathered well in advance and put together in a clearly documented folder so that it can be referenced easily.
Pictures can also be helpful if you are filing on fault-based grounds for adultery or claiming your spouse destroyed property or was violent. The photos must be authenticated. You may be able to subpoena phone companies such as Sprint, AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile if you need text records but you may not be able to get too much information from this other than the timestamp and the phone number sent. Text messages that your spouse sent you can be submitted as evidence and you should take screenshots and send them to your attorney. Another important piece of divorce evidence in many cases is financial records. You cannot have appropriate equitable distribution of property if you do not know all of the assets and liabilities included in the case.
You must produce a disclosure sheet that lists all the assets to include in the agreement to dissolve your marriage. If you expect that the other spouse is attempting to hide assets, you can raise this as a concern in court. You will need an attorney who is thoroughly experienced in evaluating your list versus the other side and working through the discovery process to keep you informed about any problems that emerge. This is a difficult time in your life and one when you must be able to trust a lawyer who cares about the best possible outcome for you as well as your family members. The gathering of this evidence may influence your life for many years to come and should therefore be taken seriously.