He received the password via SMS on his cell phone, but he no longer has the number and has never seen it.
It's best to contact the cell provider or the telecom that he has registered with that number. He can ask an attorney for him to request that number back to him for important filing like this.
There are too many tutorials about how to unlock PDF with a password without using one. But I doubt that none of them will actually work but instead will leave you some malware/virus as they require to download a software that's unknown.