Questions people ask
What paperwork do you need for a divorce?
The short answer
A Florida divorce involves court forms plus mandatory financial disclosure, which usually means tax returns, pay records, bank and investment statements, deeds, titles, loan documents and any marital agreement. The exact list for a case is set by the attorney handling it.
Source: Florida Courts, Family Law Forms — Certificate of Compliance with Mandatory Disclosure (Form 12.932). Checked 2026-09-29.
The longer answer
The certificate named in the source line is where each party confirms which disclosure documents were provided to the other. Reading it before a case starts shows the size of the job on a single page, and it tends to be longer than people expect. Print it, and mark what you already have in hand.
The documents themselves are rarely exotic. They are scattered: a drawer, an email account, an old lawyer's file, a box in the garage. Some were never in your name, some arrive only electronically, and a few exist only as the other spouse's paperwork. All of them are wanted under a deadline nobody chose.
The expensive version of this is paying an attorney's hourly rate to chase paperwork a single drawer could have held. The less costly version starts at home, with a list of what exists and who holds it. A checklist of the document types a divorce usually asks for is a sensible frame for it, and the side of preparing that is about getting organized covers the order of work. Start with the documents only you can find.
We can't tell you what your case requires. Your attorney sets that list, and the list for one case can look quite different from the list for another.
Originals versus copies in disclosure
Much of disclosure can usually be met with copies; your attorney will confirm which. A bank statement downloaded last night carries the same numbers as the paper one mailed in 2019. Nobody needs the original of a pay stub, and a vault is the wrong home for one. Statements from accounts that have since closed are worth keeping in whatever form you have them, because asking an institution for old records can take longer than you expect.
A handful of papers are different. A marital agreement, a deed, a vehicle title, an original will and a stock certificate are documents where the original itself may be asked for, or where a copy invites the question of what changed between the signing and the photocopier. Some can be requested again from whoever issued or recorded them. The ones signed across a kitchen table exist once.
Those few are the ones worth keeping together, listed on a signed inventory, so that producing one is an errand rather than a project. The rest can live in a labeled folder on your desk, where you will reach for them every week the case is open. Mark each item on your list as original or copy, so nobody has to check twice, and keep the list itself with the folder.