Dallas Divorce Law Blog by Michelle O'Neil

The current economic crisis may be putting a strain on some couples.  According to the American Psychological Association, 83% of women and 78% of men are currently stressed out about money.  But what happens when one spouse lies to the other about money.  Take, for example, the Muniz couple interviewed on Good Morning America this morning.  When the wife was pregnant and due with their child, the husband changed insurance, resulting in no coverage for the wife and child at birth.  This caused the couple to incur significant medical bills for the hospital stay and some complications.

What is financial infidelity?  It is a subtle form of cheating — disloyalty to your spouse.  Many people think it is benign because you just leave out some information — like you bought a new dress and told your husband it was on sale when it really wasn’t.  Or, your spouse gets a credit card that you don’t know anything about and hides it, with the purchases, from you.  But, any lie can be damaging to the trust relationship in a marriage and can cause cracks in the foundation.

As a Dallas divorce lawyer, I see many couples who have issues of infidelity or lying about finances.  It is too common to see a wife who has zero information about the finances.  This causes such disparity in the divorce process.  The divorce lawyer for one spouse cannot get vital information from that spouse, so the information must come, unreliably, from the other spouse.  That can also raise the expense of the divorce because the other spouse may not be forthcoming in turning over the information.  This can leave the spouse without the information, usually the wife, in a vulnerable position, subject to the dictatorial demands in negotiations of the other spouse, usually the husband.

So, if you are married, encourage your spouse to be forthcoming about the finances.  If you find out that your spouse is withholding information or lying about the finances, carefully examine the relationship for other cracks in the foundation. 

If you are contemplating divorce in Dallas, Collin, Tarrant, or Denton Counties in Tx or anywhere else for that matter, gather information about your finances and educate yourself on your marital estate before you get taken advantage of!

A recent survey of nation-wide divorce lawyers confirms a local trend — electronic evidence is being used more widely in divorce litigation.  E-mail is the most prevalent form of electronic evidence being used, but text messages and GPS tracking are other forms that litigants are finding informative. 

In Dallas area divorce litigation, there has been a distinct increase in requests for seizure of computer equipment for analysis by forensic computer experts.  Forensic (which means used in court) computer experts are able to locate information on a hard drive that was previously deleted.  The delete key is actually a fallacy — deleting information from a computer may delete it from normal view, but the information remains on the hard drive until that particular closet of memory has been written over by new information. For example, I have used this type of evidence to identify hidden assets in a property division. 

It does appear that women present electronic evidence for use in litigation more than men, according to the nation-wide survey.