“What are the best ways to prepare for divorce prior to telling your spouse that you want a divorce?”
You should have an exit strategy for leaving the relationship. It’s one thing to decide that you’re going to get a divorce, but it’s another to have a plan for where you’re going to live, a plan for housing issues if there are children, a plan for possession schedules for the children, and a plan for where they’re going to go to school. You can help yourself and your attorney by having a plan of where you want to go.
To prepare for divorce, be sure to get your documents in order. Early on in divorce cases, we need clients to gather documents. Clients can help attorneys by coming up with a budget to help us advise them, by identifying assets that are in the community estate that are subject to being divided, and by putting documents together to prove any separate property that our clients might be alleging is not subject to being divided.
Cases often start with a volume of email and texts back and forth between the parties. A party can start to gather and copy all of those documents—including bank statements, broker statements, deeds on houses, or communication between the parties—so we can help devise a plan of what would be best for our clients and what assets we want to try to secure in the divorce. We can then come up with a realistic budget so that they have the best opportunities to succeed at the end of the divorce process.
Brian Loughmiller is a partner at the McKinney, Texas law firm of Loughmiller Higgins. Serving family law clients throughout North Texas and the DFW Metroplex area, Brian and his partner, Eric Higgins, have 47 years of combined trial experience. One of the top family lawyers in the state, Brian has been recognized as a Super Lawyer every year since 2005.
Eric Higgins is a family attorney serving residents of North Texas and the DFW Metroplex area who have family law concerns and divorce issues. Eric and his partner, Brian Loughmiller, have over 47 years of combined trial experience, which provides their firm with the experience necessary to guide divorcing clients through what can otherwise be a challenging and confusing process.
Gathering documents such as electronic communication between divorcing parties often involves authentication process. To make digital documents an admissible and credible evidence for either a temporary hearing or a court trial a client needs to record and authenticate them.
Commercial software companies that offer electronic evidence authentication services timestamp and preserve digital files in a secure non-edit environment.
One of them is OnLock Digital Authentication (www.onlock.net). The company offers its patented trusted timestamping technology to create, verify authenticity and securely store any kind of electronic data, encrypting it into a unique digital signature that identifies the asset.
The other offering is an online journal – OnLock Journal – which can be used by a client to keep a daily track of events in a secure environment, recording online anything that presents proof of persistent misrepresentations or maltreatment.
Journal entries are combined with a secure link to the Attorney to share the evidence.
OnLock maximizes the legal admissibility of records by issuing a shareable Certificate of Authentication for any file, journal entry, or email properly stored in the system.
Gathering documents such as electronic communication between divorcing parties often involves authentication process. To make digital documents an admissible and credible evidence for either a temporary hearing or a court trial a client needs to record and authenticate them.
Commercial software companies that offer electronic evidence authentication services timestamp and preserve digital files in a secure non-edit environment.
One of them is OnLock Digital Authentication (www.onlock.net). The company offers its patented trusted timestamping technology to create, verify authenticity and securely store any kind of electronic data, encrypting it into a unique digital signature that identifies the asset.
The other offering is an online journal – OnLock Journal – which can be used by a client to keep a daily track of events in a secure environment, recording online anything that presents proof of persistent misrepresentations or maltreatment.
Journal entries are combined with a secure link to the Attorney to share the evidence.
OnLock maximizes the legal admissibility of records by issuing a shareable Certificate of Authentication for any file, journal entry, or email properly stored in the system.