The First 72 Hours After Receiving a Business Demand Letter From Your Spouse

Published: April 25, 2025 • Dispute Resolution

The day your spouse’s lawyer sends you a demand letter about the business is the day your marriage and your company officially stop being separate problems.

You are not just dealing with a difficult conversation at home. You are now dealing with a legal document that is aimed squarely at your finances, your company, and your credibility as a fiduciary. What you do in the first 72 hours after that letter lands will have a disproportionate impact on how painful, expensive, and public this becomes.

This article walks through those first three days in plain language. The goal is simple: keep you from making avoidable mistakes, help you preserve your options, and show you how to move from shock into a deliberate response.

Contents

What That Letter Really Means (And What It Doesn’t)

It is more than “just a letter”

A demand letter from your spouse’s lawyer is not a casual warning shot. It is usually:

A preview of the allegations and legal theories that will appear later in a divorce petition, a fiduciary-duty claim, or a shareholder/LLC lawsuit. The letter is often written with a judge in mind, not just you.
A record of what information was requested and when. Courts routinely look back at these letters to decide whether you were transparent or evasive, cooperative or obstructive.
A trigger for your obligation to preserve evidence. Once serious litigation is reasonably foreseeable, destroying or altering business records, emails, or texts is not just bad optics; it can lead to sanctions and adverse inferences.

It is not a court order (yet)

At the same time, the letter is not:

A judgment. No assets have been awarded. No one has legally determined who is right.
An injunction. Unless and until a court issues orders, you still run the business and control your accounts, subject to the same duties you had the day before you received the letter.

Understanding that balance is key. The letter is serious enough that you cannot ignore it or improvise a response, but it is early enough that you still have a lot of control over what happens next.

The First 24 Hours: Stop, Breathe, and Do No Harm

Do not respond in anger

Almost everyone’s first impulse is to fire off a reply: a long email to the spouse, a “that’s not true” message to their lawyer, a flurry of explanations to employees or family. That impulse is understandable, and it is almost always harmful.

If you do nothing else in the first day, do this: buy yourself silence. A simple one-line acknowledgment such as “I have received your letter and am reviewing it with counsel” is more than enough. Anything beyond that can usually wait until you have a strategy.

Do not “clean up” records

The second dangerous impulse is to “fix” things:

Tidying up email threads.
Deleting off-the-record Slack messages.
Adjusting QuickBooks entries or renaming accounts so they “look better.”

To a future judge, those actions do not look like housekeeping. They look like spoliation of evidence. Once you have a lawyer-drafted demand letter accusing you of mishandling marital or business assets, a court will expect that you froze the factual landscape, not edited it.

In the first 24 hours, your safest path is to touch nothing substantive in your records. You can, and should, secure access (passwords, backups, copies for counsel), but resist every urge to rewrite history.

Make a calm, private triage list

You may feel like your life just exploded. The way to shrink that feeling is to turn “everything” into a short, concrete list.

In that first day, quietly make notes—just for yourself—on at least three questions:

What exactly is the letter accusing me of, in plain English? Forget the legal jargon for a moment. Are the concerns about missing money, new entities, unexplained loans, employment issues, commingling with personal accounts, or something else?
What documents or systems would I need to show, tomorrow, if a judge said “prove that you have not done what this letter claims”? Think bank accounts, accounting software, tax returns, contracts, internal policies, and communications with key people.
Who knows about this, and who doesn’t? Your spouse and their lawyer obviously do. But what about your co-owners, your accountant, your bookkeeper, your manager? Right now, silence is better than gossip. You simply want to understand how contained this is.

You are not building your defense yet. You are mapping the landscape so you are not walking into your lawyer’s office saying “I have no idea what this is about.”

Hours 24–48: Bring Counsel In and Start Building the File

Get the right combination of lawyers involved

If your marriage and your business are tied together, you do not just have “a divorce problem” or “a corporate problem.” You have both. In the second day, your goal is to get legal brains in the loop who can see the entire picture.

Depending on your situation, that may mean:

Your existing family-law counsel, if you already have one, now focused specifically on the business allegations and disclosure obligations.
Your corporate or business counsel, who understands the entity structure, past transactions, and governance history.
If you do not yet have either, someone who is comfortable with both domains or willing to coordinate with another lawyer rather than treating the business as an afterthought.

When you meet or speak with counsel, bring the demand letter and that triage list you made. The letter tells them what the other side is planning to say. Your list tells them what material they need to see first.

Start a “demand letter file” and centralize everything

From this point forward, assume that everything connected to this letter is part of a case file. Treat it that way.

Create a single, secure place—digital or physical—for:

The letter itself and any earlier communications that led up to it.
Your notes about what is true, what is wrong, and what you simply don’t know yet.
A running index of where key records live: which bank, which accounting system, which document storage, which email accounts.

This is not busywork. When deadlines arrive or motions are filed, you do not want to be asking “Where did we put that?” You want to be able to hand your lawyer a single folder that contains the entire story.

Work with counsel on a litigation hold

Good counsel will almost immediately talk to you about a “litigation hold.” That is a formal-sounding label for a simple idea: once serious litigation is reasonably foreseeable, you must preserve relevant evidence.

In practice, that often looks like:

Suspending any automatic deletion of emails or messages for key people and accounts.
Instructing your bookkeeper, accountant, and any internal finance staff not to delete or alter records related to the subjects raised in the letter.
Making secure backups of important data systems so that if something is accidentally lost later, you can show that you took preservation seriously from the start.

You do not need to invent this from scratch. Your lawyer will help you decide how broad the hold should be and who needs to be included. Your job is to implement it faithfully and quietly.

Hours 48–72: Move From Panic to Strategy

Separate the noise from the real risk

By the third day, you and your counsel should be in a position to sort the letter into buckets:

Allegations that are factually wrong or exaggerated. These still matter, because they tell you what narrative the other side wants to sell. But they are not where your legal exposure is.
Allegations that are technically correct but contextually defensible. Maybe you did move funds between entities, but with proper documentation and a legitimate business purpose. Maybe you did reduce reported income, but because a major client left, not because you hid revenue.
Allegations that hit too close to home. These are the situations where, looking at your own records, you do not like what you see. Chronic use of company accounts for personal expenses, undocumented “loans” to yourself, loosely documented related-party deals, or missing basic records.

The first 72 hours are not about fixing those problems. They are about being honest, privately, about which issues will need careful explanation and which will require structural changes going forward.

Decide who needs to know and what they should hear

At some point, other people will have to be brought into the circle: co-owners, key managers, outside accountants, perhaps even insurers. Doing that in the first 72 hours is often premature, but you and your counsel should at least sketch the communication plan.

A simple way to think about it is:

Audience	Likely Need-to-Know Role	Tone and Content of Early Communication
Co-owners / partners	They may be affected by discovery, protective orders, or structural changes.	Calm, factual, lawyer-coordinated explanation that a dispute exists and will be handled through counsel, without sharing unnecessary personal detail.
Accountant / bookkeeper	They will be central to gathering records and implementing any litigation hold.	Clear instruction not to alter records, coupled with reassurance that they are not under personal attack.
Key managers	They may notice tension or process changes.	Limited information, focused on continuity of operations and avoidance of gossip; no substantive discussion of allegations.

The worst outcome is a panicked, off-the-cuff announcement that fuels rumor, sides-taking, and reflexive blame. You are aiming for the opposite: controlled, minimal, and coordinated.

Shape the tone of your eventual written response

Your lawyer is likely to draft a formal written response to the demand letter. Even if that response will not go out until after the first 72 hours, this is when you start deciding what posture it should take.

Broadly, responses fall into a few recognizable patterns:

Cooperative but protective. This response acknowledges legitimate concerns, commits to providing certain categories of information, and proposes a structured process (and, if necessary, confidentiality protections), while resisting overbroad or harassing requests.
Firm and corrective. This response corrects factual errors, rejects legal overreach, and makes clear that some demands have no basis in law or contract, but still does so in a professional tone that a judge would recognize as restrained.
Aggressive and counter-accusatory. This is the “how dare you” letter that treats every allegation as an insult and responds in kind, sometimes threatening countersuits and sanctions.

Only the first two tend to age well in front of courts. In the first 72 hours, your job is to resist the gravitational pull of that third category. Write out everything you are tempted to say if you must, but do it in a private document that never leaves your own files. Then work with your counsel on language that makes you look like the grown-up in the room.

What Not to Do in the First 72 Hours

It is helpful, before we close, to be explicit about a few things that consistently make situations worse.

Do not weaponize employees or children. Dragging staff into the marital fight or using children as messengers may feel satisfying in the moment; courts see it as a red flag about judgment and stability. Keep work issues at work and family issues out of the office as much as possible.

Do not lie, even “just for now.” The temptation to smooth over a problem with a half-truth—about an account, a transaction, or an entity—can be strong when you are panicked. The problem is that documents almost always tell the story eventually. Judges and opposing counsel are generally more forgiving of messy facts than of demonstrated dishonesty.

Do not sign anything “just to calm things down.” It is common for a demand letter to be accompanied by a proposed agreement, consent, or “temporary” arrangement. You may eventually decide that some interim agreement is in your interest. Signing in the first 72 hours, before you and your counsel have fully unpacked the implications, is a different matter entirely.

Do not assume this will “blow over” on its own. Serious, lawyer-drafted letters almost never vanish. They are the first chapter of whatever comes next. Treating them as such—without panicking, but without minimizing—is part of protecting yourself, your company, and, ironically, your future version of the relationship, whatever form it eventually takes.

The first 72 hours after receiving a demand letter from your spouse are not about winning or losing. They are about stabilizing the situation, preserving evidence, and setting yourself up to respond in a way that a future judge will recognize as responsible, disciplined, and proportionate. You cannot change the fact that the letter arrived. You have a great deal of influence over what the world looks like when someone—months from now—asks, “What did you do next?”