The first 72 hours

Read the standing order first

El Paso County family courts issue a standing order that attaches automatically to new suits. Neither party has to ask for it and neither party gets to opt out. It takes effect the moment the petition is filed and it binds both of you.

In broad terms it prohibits both parties from doing any of the following while the case is pending.

• Spending or transferring community funds outside the ordinary course of business or the necessities of life.
• Selling, encumbering, hiding or damaging community property.
• Cancelling, changing or allowing to lapse health, life, auto or homeowner insurance, or changing a beneficiary.
• Removing a child from the county, or from the other parent's possession in violation of the order.
• Harassing, threatening or disturbing the peace of the other party or the children.
• Withdrawing a child from school or daycare without written agreement or a court order.

Violating it is contempt, punishable by fine and in serious cases by jail. Far more commonly, it is punished by the judge simply not believing you about anything else.

The documents to gather now

You will need all of these eventually. Gathering them in week one, while you still have account access, is dramatically cheaper than subpoenaing them in month five.

Save everything to a location the other party cannot reach: a personal cloud account with a new password, or a USB drive kept somewhere else.

Eight things not to do

• Do not empty a joint account

  The standing order restricts spending outside the ordinary course. It is the first thing raised at temporary orders and it damages your credibility for the rest of the case.

• Do not delete messages, photos or social posts

  Deleting relevant material is spoliation. A court may instruct that the deleted material would have been harmful to you.

• Do not take the children out of the county

  The standing order prohibits it, and removing a child is treated as a custody act, not a holiday.

• Do not change insurance or beneficiaries

  Also restricted by the standing order, and it can leave your own children uninsured mid-case.

• Do not record a conversation you are not part of

  Texas is a one-party consent state for your own conversations. Intercepting others can be a criminal offence and a federal wiretap issue.

• Do not discuss the case with the children

  It is the fastest way to lose an amicus attorney or an evaluator, and it is the thing children remember.

• Do not post about it

  Every public post is a potential exhibit, and privacy settings do not prevent a subpoena or a screenshot from a mutual friend.

• Do not sign anything the other party's lawyer sends

  A waiver of service, an agreed order or a property agreement can be binding immediately. Have it read first.

How to preserve evidence so it is actually usable

Most of what clients bring us is inadmissible in the form they bring it. A screenshot of one message invites an objection that the rest of the conversation is missing. A photograph with no date is worth very little. These habits fix that.

• Export whole threads, not fragments. Both iOS and Android allow a full conversation export. It preserves timestamps and sequence.
• Keep the original file. Emailing a photo to yourself can strip the metadata that proves when it was taken. Copy the original file instead.
• Log incidents the same day. A dated contemporaneous note is far stronger than a memory reconstructed for a hearing six months later.
• Use one communication channel. A single co-parenting app thread is reviewable. Four apps and a phone log are not.
• Do not edit, crop or annotate. An altered exhibit becomes an argument about you rather than about the evidence.
• Request records early. Schools, doctors and banks all have processing times, and some destroy records on a schedule.