New discovery rules in Texas will change the divorce process and the cost.
Watch the video here; New discovery rules in Texas and how they affect the cost of your divorce in 2021
Today, I want to talk about how the new discovery rules affect your pocketbook. By that, I mean the costs associated with complying with the new discovery rules and how that affects your bill.
Many times when people hire lawyers, they’re worried about how the lawyer spends the money they have on deposit. Well, we talked in my initial disclosure video about how the more structured you can provide the information to us, the more affordably we can comply with the rules. Watch this video here, Why you should go “all in” during your discovery process
What you also need to know is that there are other components to the new discovery rules that also cause an increase in your fees and expenses associated with the money you put in trust.
Now, we talked about the expert disclosures in another video, and those expert disclosures are required to be provided to the other side within four months of the trial date. And so that’s a hundred and twenty days, roughly, before the trial is set. Oftentimes, we don’t even get a hundred and twenty days’ worth of notice. So, again, that’s another reason we need you to be proactive in providing us the expert information. This is an expense that we didn’t have prior to these new discovery rules.
How to Keep Your Costs Down
Now, the next rule change may cause an increase in your cost in the pretrial disclosures. Pretrial disclosures are now required to be filed with the court and given to the other side 30 days before the trial date. A list of all the witnesses and all the exhibits is required to be provided. Now the exhibits are oftentimes documents that we’ve either provided to the other side in discovery, received from the other side, or a third party. So what that means for you is that we’ll decide which witnesses and what records or information we’ll introduce at trial.
When you tell us who you want us to call as witnesses, that narrows down for us the people that we need to call. I want you to provide all the people there are that have knowledge of relevant facts. I also want you to narrow down for me what each person knows or what you think they know and how that’s important. So, if you can tell me, I think X person knows this, then I can call that person. “Hey, my client told me that you might have information. Do you have information about whatever,” and then they can tell me what they know.
Now, during that time, I can decide if I think they’ll be a viable or a good witness. If they only know it because you told them, that is not admissible testimony. Keep your list of people you actually want me to call as a witness narrow. The more specific you can be the better. The new discovery rules will cause automatically an increase in the fees associated with your case upfront.
Call An Experienced Texas Divorce Attorney
So hopefully, this helps you understand when the bill comes why there are more expenses earlier on in the lawsuit. And the more involved that you are in helping us, the better we can be good stewards of your money. We want you to communicate with us. We want you to let us know what you think is important because after all it’s your case. So when you’re ready to proceed, give us a call so we can get started.
