What to ask a new divorce client for

A divorce intake list has a problem an estate planning list does not: most of it is not yours to decide. Disclosure obligations are set by rule, they differ by state, and in some places they run automatically whether or not anyone asks. So what follows is not a statement of what your jurisdiction requires — it is the list most firms end up asking for anyway, arranged by what each document decides and by how urgent it is to have it.

Take it, cut it, put your own letterhead on it.

Ask for these first

Five items. Not because the rest does not matter, but because a client in the first fortnight of a separation has a limited supply of attention and it is worth spending on the things that shape the case.

Three years of tax returns, complete with schedules. The schedules are the point. A K-1 nobody mentioned, a rental loss, a business the client described as “not really anything” — these turn up in the attachments rather than on the first page.

Recent pay stubs for both parties, if they have them. Year-to-date figures do more work than an annual salary, because they carry the bonus, the overtime and the deductions that an annual figure smooths away.

A list of accounts, not the statements yet. Bank, brokerage, retirement, crypto. Institution and rough balance is enough at this stage; you are mapping the estate, not valuing it.

The marriage date, and the date of separation as the client understands it. Both, in writing, early. The second one is frequently contested later and the client’s own first account of it is worth having before anybody has a reason to revise it.

Any existing court order involving these parties or these children. Including from another state, including ones the client thinks expired. A custody order elsewhere can decide which court hears this at all.

The documents that get harder to obtain every month

This is the part worth moving on, and the reason to ask early even when the case is slow.

Characterisation and division turn on what things were worth at particular dates — the marriage, the separation, sometimes a transfer in between. Those dates are usually in the past when the client walks in, and the evidence of them has a shelf life:

• Online banking portals commonly show only the last 18 to 24 months. Older statements mean a written request, a fee, and a wait.
• Retirement plan administrators are slower than banks, and slower again when the participant is the other spouse.
• Employers purge records. A pay stub from four years ago may exist only in the client’s own filing.
• A business that is being valued will need records from before anybody was thinking about a valuation.

So the practical move is to ask the client to pull everything they can reach now, while they still have access to a shared account, a joint portal, or a filing cabinet in a house they are living in. Access is often the first thing lost, and it is lost without notice.

Two things worth telling the client plainly, because they land better at intake than three months in:

• Download rather than screenshot. A PDF from the institution is a document; a photograph of a screen is an argument waiting to happen.
• Do not move money or close accounts to tidy things up before asking. The instinct is understandable and the inference drawn later is not kind.

What can wait

Requesting all of this at once is what makes people stop reading. It is better asked for once there is something to attach it to.

• Full statements for each account, over whatever period the case actually needs
• Deeds, mortgage statements and any home valuation
• Retirement plan documents, as opposed to balances — the plan type decides how, and whether, it can be divided
• Debt detail: cards, loans, anything personally guaranteed, anything in one name only
• Business documents where either party has an interest: operating agreement, buy-sell, two or three years of returns
• Child-related costs: childcare, school, medical, anything extraordinary and recurring
• Insurance policies, including who is named on them today
• Premarital, inherited or gifted property, with whatever evidence of origin exists

Two things that outlive the decree

Worth raising at intake even though they are resolved at the end, because clients assume the judgment does the work by itself:

A decree that divides a retirement plan usually does not, on its own, move the money. That typically takes a separate order directed at the plan, and plans reject them for formatting as readily as for substance. It is the most common loose end left after a case closes.

And beneficiary designations do not necessarily change because a marriage ended. Clients assume the divorce revoked them. Sometimes it did; often it did not, and the answer depends on the type of plan rather than on what anyone intended. Whatever the law where you practise, it is worth an item on a closing checklist rather than a surprise years later.

What a list like this cannot do

It cannot tell you what is missing. A client who does not mention an account is not withholding it — they have usually forgotten it exists, and nothing in a checklist surfaces that. A second conversation does.

It cannot tell you what the documents mean. A buy-sell agreement that fixes a price, a trust the client is a beneficiary of, a loan from a parent that may or may not be a loan — all of them look like ordinary paperwork until someone reads them against the facts.

And it cannot stand in for your own jurisdiction’s rules. What is mandatory, what is automatic and what has a deadline attached are not things any general list can tell you, and are precisely the things with consequences.

Using this

Send the five-item version first, with a deadline that is a date. The rest belongs in a second request, after the first meeting, when the client knows why it is being asked for.

There is nothing to sign up for on this page and nothing to buy. If the collecting part is the bit that eats your week rather than the asking part, that is what we build — but the list works on its own, which is the point of publishing it.