How you get documents when the other person involved in your West Virginia divorce. If one’s soon to be former spouse is either not providing the documents needed or that person is not aware of the documents for some reason and you believe that the documents are important for your case and they actually exist, then what does one do? For example, let’s say that you’ve got your financial disclosures. You’ve gotten some of the documents that you need to support your case for let’s say equitable distribution or alimony, but you can’t get the documents and you’ve asked the soon to be former spouse for those documents and they have not provided the documents to you. Sometimes the other person will claim that they don’t know where the documents are or they don’t exist.
If in particular talking about bank accounts or saving accounts or retirement accounts, those are all things that the other person may or may not have in their possession. Well, what you need to do then is first of all, you can send the person what we call a discovery request and they have to return answers to those discovery requests in writing along with the documents that you requested, to the extent that they are reasonably available.
Sometimes they won’t provide these documents and they’ll claim that the documents don’t exist or the person will claim that they can’t get access to them for some reason. In this situation, you would serve it at the actual institution where you think the document is located. If there’s a bank account that your soon to be former spouse says doesn’t exist, at this point you can serve a subpoena and the bank actually has to provide copies of those records. There are various institutions that you can go to. You have to have some sort of inclination that the documents you need are at a particular place.
The rules of civil procedure about properly serving the business generally apply though sometimes there’ll be waived by the actual institution based on their own internal rules. However, generally speaking, that’s the process. You serve them with a subpoena and at that point in time, the institution is required to provide you those documents, assuming there has been proper service. If you can’t get the documents from your soon to be former spouse, it’s not the end of the world. There are other ways you can go. You can go about getting the documents that you need to present your case in other ways which is a positive as well.
