Evidence Needs to Be Authenticated Properly
Video Transcribed: I’m Oklahoma dad’s attorney Jason Lile. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about evidence. Obviously, if you’ve watched any TV shows about the court, you know nothing else about the court, you know that evidence is important.
But when it comes to custody cases, divorce cases involving children, or post-decree matters, evidence is a little bit different creature and it needs to be treated differently in a way that will strengthen your case when it comes time to go to battle in court.
Specifically, I have a lot of fathers who say, hey, I’ve been recording all this time, or I have dozens and dozens of emails, or I have lots and lots of people who will say that I’m a good person in court. Some of those things are useful and some of them aren’t.
And in order to have your representation go the best way that it can, you need an experienced attorney to help you sift through what could be useful, and what’s not useful.
For example, some of the evidence that people bring me is hearsay and it’s inadmissible in court. We need to establish whether the person that said that or knows about that is available to go to court. And are they willing and friendly to be a witness to you?
With regard to emails, different courts treat emails very differently. They need to be authenticated properly. They need to be organized. They need to be sifted by the attorney with the client’s input about what might be useful in court and what might not.
Duplicative evidence is often just annoying to the judge and a waste of time. So if you have one piece of evidence that says something, topic A for example, and then you have 14 other emails that say the same thing, a good attorney will be helping you to use that evidence in the most efficient manner possible. Just one will do, maybe two. Same with witnesses.
And then when it comes to recordings, certain types of recordings in Oklahoma are illegal. You have to be one of the parties in the recording because it’s a one-party state. You cannot set up a tape recorder in the baby’s mother’s or the children’s mother’s bedroom, or just record her in a third party because that’s against the law.
So you need an experienced attorney to tell you here’s the type of evidence we can use. Here’s how to gather it. Here’s what to do with the evidence that you do have, and here’s what not to do. So that when you’re ready to go to court, you’re prepared to present the best case possible for you and your children. And please feel free to contact the Tulsa dad’s rights lawyer or the Tulsa Child Custody Attorney for Men at dads.law
