Texas Divorce Tips

Back in the olden dayes, when my dad was just beginning to practice law, you filed your suit, you showed up at the courthouse, you had a trial, told your story, and had the judge or jury decide who won and how much money changed hands.

The trouble was that if a little guy was suing a big company (like the streetcar company), he just didn't know if the big company had a history of doing negligent things, enough to get the jury mad enough to send a signal to the company to fix it. As a general rule, the Corporation had the upper hand.

Several decades ago, in order to make more cases settle (and make the judges not work so hard), they came up with "discovery", which is the process by which each of the parties involved in lawsuit could require the other side(s) to produce certain information. The theory is that the more information that changed hands about a lawsuit, the fairer everything was, and the more likely things would settle. So, the lawyer for Joe Schmoe, injured in s a streetcar accident, could make the streetcar company "produce" (or provide) information on who else was riding the streetcar that day, how many accidents like that the streetcar company had had in the last few years, how many times this conductor had been disciplined for showing up for work with alcohol on his breath, and so on.

Then, a couple of decades ago, discovery abuse gave rise to what they call "Rambo Litigation" in which one side would require so much information and so much work that folks would settle the case for an unfair amount just to get away from the Rambo litigation sausage factory. Joe Schmoe would conduct 8-hour depositions of darned near everybody that ever worked for the streetcar company, and would request every maintenance record on every streetcar going back 10 years.

Then, a little over a decade ago, they revised the rules, impemented Rule 190 of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, and standardized how much discovery could be conducted, and how it would be conducted, depending on the complexity of the case. Level 1 cases were the simplest cases, and limited discovery was permitted. Most cases were Level 2 cases, and more discovery was allowed. And if your case was more complex, you called it Level 3, and had a conference with the judge about what sort of discovery would be allowed.

In a divorce, it can only be Level 1 (most limited discovery) if there are no kids, and the value of the community property estate is more than zero but less than $50,000. Now, that's odd, because there's no reason why the discovery should be more involved if the value of the community property estate is less than zero (more debt than assets), but that's the way the legislature passed the bill.