We received a Defendant's Notice to Produce and Request for Production of Documents to the Bank this morning. This request was from the Defendant's (our customer)Attorney. Are we supposed to have written authorization for a request of this nature from our customer?

If we get any notice like that we send it straight to our legal council.

Your customer is involved in litigation and your customer's attorney acts on behalf of your customer. Each state has laws that spell out how a bank is to respond to a subpoena or other legal processes involving litigation.

The other posts are correct in that you need to pass it on to your bank counsel (not council) for review.

One reason why your customer's attorney may be serving a litigation document production request on you is that your customer's attorney wants the bank to produce the requested records with a "custodian or records declaration". The declaration serves to "authenticate" the produced documents and make the documents admissible into evidence under the business records exception to the hearsay rule. Probably this is more than you want to know about litigation but am just passing it on for those viewers who might wonder why the customer doesn't ask for the documents. (The other most likely reason is that the cost of production may be cheaper under your state's discovery/civil procedure laws than your disclosure agreement).