The debate so far over whether Apple should help the U.S. government execute a warrant to see what is on one of its phones has focused on the information of a dead terrorist and the prospective data breach (according to Apple) of millions of law abiding citizens.

The stakes are high, but lost in the discussion is the future of data retrieval to fight another kind of wrongdoing: deadbeat parents who won’t pay child support or greedy spouses who hide assets during and after divorce.

We spend a lot of time looking for such assets, and while we have generated lots of good leads, nailing the case often requires the production of bank accounts.

Imagine this: Husband handles all the finances of his businesses and gives Wife an allowance to run the home, pay the school fees and taxes. When Husband decides to end the marriage, he begins to divert cash taken out of the business to bank accounts held in the names of limited liability companies he has set up around the country. Some of the accounts are in Caribbean tax havens.

The court orders Husband to produce all financial records. He does, but they seem “light.” Husband is ordered to produce his phone as evidence, since some of his banking may be paperless. He hands over the phone but not the password. “If a dead terrorist has rights, so have I,” he proclaims.

Recall that Apple co-operated with law enforcement in handing over everything the terrorist had backed up on the i-cloud. It was just the material not backed up that Apple decided it should not have to help uncover.

What should wives like the woman in our example do to protect themselves against super-encrypted, paperless financial records available for the price of a smartphone?

One idea we had in our office was this: draft a prenuptial agreement that shifts financial burdens in the event that the entire contents of the phone are not backed up once a week. In the event of a divorce, once Husband can be shown to have stopped uploading the records to the cloud, he automatically surrenders his share of tangible assets the wife can find: homes, cars, shares of businesses.

Some states may frown on such an approach, but we will have to figure something out if millions of us (in a world in which Apple prevails) can go dark as to our financial records at the drop of a hat.

Side note: would we back Apple if the facts and company involved were a little different? What if Goldman Sachs built a super-secure bank vault miles underground in the desert? Hedge fund billionaires and Russian oligarchs use the vault to keep records that could prove tax evasion, insider trading, market rigging and a host of other financial crimes. The vault is booby-trapped to explode if anyone tries to break into it. Even if you get past that system, each individual box is rigged so that if anyone dries to drill into it, acid is released and destroys the contents.

When presented with a court order to open the vault, Goldman says, “No. If we break into one bad guy’s vault, the secret of how to disable it would leak out and someone else could break in. Our customers find this offensive.”