Evidence Navigator · adapted from the evidence taxonomy
Bank & financial records
Statements for checking, savings, brokerage, and retirement accounts — the backbone of support and equitable-distribution cases, and most of what Rule 12.285 already makes both sides produce.
Wired to the law it implements
Retrieved live from the source-locked corpus — never generated.
“certification or declaration from the custodian of the records or another qualified person certifying or declaring that the record: (a) Was made at or near the time of the occurrence of the matters set forth by, or from information transmitted by, a person having knowledge of those”The five gates, for this item type
Neutral education — each gate runs separately, and passing one is never presented as admissibility. The Five Gates page carries the full statutory walk.
- Relevance
Income, spending, assets, dissipation — financial statements bear on the money issues almost by definition; the question is commonly which months and which accounts.
- Authentication
Statements produced by the institution, or through the other side's own disclosure, commonly carry cleaner showings than home-made summaries.
- Hearsay
Bank records are the classic regularly-conducted-business-activity exception — WITH the right foundation or certification, which is what § 90.902(11)'s certification lane exists for.
- Best evidence
Complete statements beat excerpts; a highlighted page from a missing statement invites the completeness objection.
- Privilege
Rarely in play for the parties' own accounts.
The organizer checklist
Generic, neutral, and yours to select from — organization, never legal acts. The Evidence Organizer is where the log lives.
- Gather complete statements for the periods Rule 12.285 requires — not excerpts
- Keep online access to your own accounts working through the case
- Note which accounts are individual, joint, or the children's
- Match large or unusual transactions to what they were, by date
- Track what you produced and received in the Disclosure Tracker
Objections to expect — as education
- HearsayThe objection says the item is an out-of-court statement offered to prove what it asserts.
- Completeness (§ 90.108)The objection says a partial writing or recording misleads without its context — and the statute lets the other side require the rest to come in with it..
- Lack of authenticationThe objection says nobody has shown the item is what it claims to be — the condition precedent the statute states in one sentence..
Getting this class of evidence INTO the case has its own rulebook — the Procedure Matrix maps disclosure, discovery, and the subpoena to the family rules that govern them.
Where this page stops
Whether YOUR bank & financial records clear these gates depends on facts and foundations this page cannot see and will not guess. Independent attorney review is the route for judgment.
Statutory excerpts are verbatim from the hash-verified corpus; statutory text renders in English as enacted. Legal information, not legal advice.