Since many court cases are won or lost due to digital communications, you need to know some basic rules of evidence and learn how to preserve text messages for use in court.
It could be a Divorce, a Child Custody case, Breach of Contract, or honestly any type of case. Everyone needs to know how to use text messages, emails, in Court.
Chapters:
00:00 - Winning Trial With Texts/Social Media
00:37 - Proof needed to use Texts, Emails, & Social Media in Court
00:50 - What are “authentic” Texts, Emails, & Social Media
01:36 - What is “Authorship?”
02:21 - How to preserve Texts, Emails, & Social Media
04:43 - Messages in a Family Law Case
05:53 - Ready for Court
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People often have a lot of questions about how to use evidence in court. For Example: How to save text messages on iPhone? How to use Facebook messages in Court? How to print text messages on Android? How to print text messages on iPhone? Are text messages admissible in court? How do I give my lawyer my text messages? How do I authenticate text messages in Court?
Here’s a little evidence
For you to be able to use text messages at trial you need to show that 1) they are authentic and accurate copies of the originals and 2) the identity of the author.
Let’s discuss authentication.
Evidence that you use at trial must be authentic. That means that you need to be able to show that the evidence is what you say it is. One of the obvious difficulties in authenticating text messages is because you don’t want to hand over your phone into evidence, so you need a reliable way to extract those messages.
The most common way of authenticating text messages is to create screenshots of the messages, and then provide testimony to show that the screenshots are true and accurate copies of the originals.
Where people usually fail in Court is when they only take screenshots of portions of the conversation, or they aren’t able to show that there have been no edits, deletions, or alterations to the text messages.
Now we’ll discuss Authorship.
Simply showing that text messages came from a specific phone number is not enough. A friend could have taken the person’s phone and said something hateful that the phone owner wouldn’t have said, or the phone number could have been spoofed and now you’re getting text messages from a stranger.
However, it doesn’t take very much more in order to prove authorship. Your goal in demonstrating authorship is simply tying these text messages back to a specific person. For example, some Court’s have found that text messages received around the same time as phone calls with an individual where the phone call referenced the texts and the texts referenced the phone calls was sufficient to demonstrate authorship. It also helps if the text messages that you’re receiving from an Ex-wife or Ex-Husband contains information that only the Ex would know. All of this helps to prove authorship.
Let’s talk preservation.
As promised, I’m going to demonstrate what I think is the best practice in preserving text messages in both a breach of contract case and a family law case.
You should start thinking about these messages as conversations. You’d never want to jump into the middle of a conversation because it helps to have the whole picture. You may not end up using the whole conversation at trial, but as far as preserving messages it really helps to have the complete conversation.
Here we have text messages between our fake client and the opposing party for what may turn into a breach of contract. I say fake because obviously we’re not posting our actual client’s text messages on the internet.
As you can see, there are several screen’s worth of text messages here, so we have to be careful that we preserve all of them to demonstrate that they are authentic, true, and correct copies.
So we start at the top, and you should notice how we are careful to frame this first shot and then we take a screenshot.
Here take note that we’ve got the name saved in the contacts under “opposin...
Conclusion
There, now that you understand rules of evidence concerning authentication and authorship, and have seen demonstrated some of the best practices (in my opinion) on preserving text messages, you’re in a better position to prepare trial exhibits in order to achieve success in the courtroom.
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