I am helping some elderly family members who are suing somebody in Arizona.
Helping them how? Suing somebody for what?
The defendant has submitted a copy of their emails from an individual in Wisconsin
Huh? "[T]heir emails from an individual in Wisconsin"?
the records that the individual submitted are protected records that would likely require a court order to obtain.
Why do you think that, and are you including a subpoena as a type of court order?
Does anybody know how to go about this?
Yes. Virtually every attorney who handles civil litigation knows how.
Would a court order (then presented as a foreign subpoena to the appropriate court district in Wisconsin) be enough?
I don't have any idea how the process works in Arizona or Wisconsin (and, to the best of my knowledge, no lawyers admitted in either of those states follow these boards regularly), but here's a very general overview.
If a party to a lawsuit in State X wants to obtain discovery from a person or entity in State Y, that party will need to first figure out what the procedure is in State Y. Sometimes, it's very simple. For example, if State Y were California, the party could simply file what's called a "miscellaneous action" in California, which is essentially a lawsuit whose only purpose is to allow a subpoena to be issued in connection with litigation pending in another state. In other states, however, it may be that the party will need to get a a court order from the State X court and take that order to a court in State Y to obtain a subpoena. Memory serves me that some states used sort of a middle ground, but that's about the long and the short of it. When I practiced privately and we needed discovery from another state, we would engage an attorney in that other state to assist us. Without doing that, it would almost certainly take a tremendous amount of research to get it right.
I'm just asking if anybody knows the basic process for issuing a foreign subpoena in which protected records are involved.
Please explain exactly what you mean by "protected records."
getting pro bono assistance these days is very difficult.
"[G]etting pro bono assistance" in garden variety civil litigation has
always been very difficult because lawyers -- no different than anyone else -- don't typically like to work for free. That's why "Tax Counsel" did not say anything about "pro bono assistance."
nor am I acting as a lawyer.
You're conducting legal research on behalf of a litigant. That very much
is "acting as a lawyer." You can say, "oh, I'm just helping my family members," all you want, but it's the nature of the action that makes for unauthorized practice of law. It's obviously up to you to accept or reject information you get from anonymous strangers on the internet, but I doubt you'd have posted here if you didn't think folks here knew what they were talking about.
If your family member asked you what the general process for something was, would you say to them "I'm not your lawyer, sorry!"? Or would you provide them with the appropriate resource?
You ask that question as though you're simply giving them something you already have. But you don't have it and apparently don't have the first clue about how things work. If I weren't an attorney, I'd say, "Sorry; I'm not an attorney and don't know how to do proper legal research, so I'm not a good candidate to help." It's no different than, if a family member came to me and said, "Hey...I'm having a weird pain just below my navel and my poop looks weird." I wouldn't try to play doctor. Rather, I'd refer the family member to a real doctor.
