A subpoena for documents is a court order to turn over specific documents during the discovery process before a trial. The judge examines the reasonableness of the request and issues a subpoena, which must be complied with. The records must belong to a party involved in the case, and the subpoena must be reasonable and not require privileged communications. Failure to comply may result in fines or jail time.
A subpoena for documents is a court order that a person turns over a specific document or set of documents. It usually occurs during the discovery process before a trial. The court will order the documents to be turned over because it believes the documents are necessary to prove an element of a felony or civil case, and therefore should be turned over in the interests of justice.
There are different types of subpoenas, but each generally has the same procedure and associated results. Either a person suing or a person being sued will believe they need information that is in the possession of someone else who won’t hand it over. The person who needs the information will go to the judge and ask the judge to compel him or have it delivered. The judge will examine why the information is needed and the reasonableness of the request and determine whether to issue a subpoena.
The subpoena will then be served on the person who has the requested information. That person will be required to comply with what the summons asks them to do. If it’s a subpoena for documents, for example, he’ll have to produce and deliver those documents. If you fail to comply with the terms of the subpoena, you may be held in contempt of court and/or tried for obstruction of justice. Either way, he could face fines or even jail time.
In order for a subpoena for documents to be issued, the records generally must belong to one of the parties involved in the case or must belong to a person or entity with significant involvement in the case. For example, an individual cannot sue his neighbor’s tax records just because he wants to prove to the county that his taxes are too high compared to his neighbor’s. On the other hand, a person who sues his neighbor for fraudulently stealing from him could potentially subpoena documents proving the theft, such as bank statements, if he had enough evidence to convince a judge that the statements would contain evidence of fraud.
In addition to the subpoena having a relationship to the case, the subpoena for documents must be reasonable and the information must not be inside. For example, a party cannot ask the judge to sue someone to return every bank transaction he has ever made, because doing so would be prohibitively expensive, time consuming, and unnecessary. Similarly, a subpoena for documents cannot require a person to hand over privileged communications between an attorney and a client because those documents are protected by law.
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