Attorneys and clients often find themselves needing to accurately document and print text messages for court, mediation, or legal proceedings. Each year there are millions more legal cases where text messages are being used as evidence in a trial and also by lawyers for discovery.
Statista estimates estimates that by 2025 approximately 3.51 billion users will use messaging apps to communicate. That’s a tremendous amount of messages sent via mobile devices! This includes iOS, Android, and also popular messaging apps like WhatsApp Messenger, Viber, Line, and WeChat. With text messaging and messaging apps now solidified as one of the world’s most popular forms of daily communication, the need to document and preserve text / sms messages for evidence in court has increased dramatically.
No matter how you preserve text messages for evidence, you'll want to make sure that the records have all of the information necessary for them to be admissible in court. Consult a lawyer for the specifics in your region about what information is required. For most legal matters the following details should be visible in your text message documentation:
Whether you are a lawyer, law enforcement official, or simply someone who has a pending court case or legal matter, there are several solutions for saving and printing text messages so that you can preserve evidence from your mobile phone's sms message history.
For iPhone / iPad, we recommend using Decipher TextMessage to save and print out your text messages for court. Decipher TextMessage is already a trusted and widely used program by lawyers and law enforcement officials for preserving any messaging data in a format that will hold up in a legal environment. Features include:
Follow these steps to print and save text messages for court
All your text messages for court will be read into the software and displayed in chat bubble format with the contact and time/date stamp on each message. Here's an example of what you will see in the program:
Another way to print out your iPhone text messages is by taking screenshots of each text message screen on your device. To take a screenshot you press the "Home" and "Sleep/Wake" button to capture what is on your iPhone screen. There are various pros and cons of using the screenshot method. Some of these include:
We have step-by-step instructions outlined in our helpful YouTube video which will walk any iPhone user through the exact steps and directions so that you can immediately save your text messages for court, trial, or your attorney.
There are several popular programs available for saving text messages from an Android device to your computer Some are free and some can be purchased for a fee in the Google Play Store. One popular app is SMS Backup +. The program stores texts in your Gmail account and lets you access them from any web browser.
To take a screenshot of any Android device is fairy simple, however the commands are different depending on your specific device.
Whether your device is an iPhone or an Android, we hope these tips for preserving and saving your text messages for court or a legal issue have been helpful. Remember to back up your mobile data to your computer on a regular basis so that all your important information is safe and secure.
We've seen a few questions in the comments section below about documenting text messages for non-smart phones. Contact us via our support page if you're interested in this and we'll be happy follow up with you! Please be sure to mention the specific kind of feature phone from which you want to document sms/mms messages; the techniques and details vary depending on the phone manufacturer/operating system.
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