How to Prepare and Send your iPhone Text Messages to your Lawyer

If you're working remotely with your attorney, you may need to independently save your iPhone text messages and iMessages and send them electronically to your lawyer.

Here is our step-by-step guide for preparing and sending your text message transcripts with the needed meta-data/information to your lawyer.

We'll start with a brief overview of all of the steps, and then dig into each one with more detail.

How to Send your iPhone text messages to your Attorney

Steps to follow to send iPhone text messages to your lawyer:

1. Plug your iPhone into your computer.
2. Open Decipher TextMessage and select Back Up.
3. Select your iPhone and pick a contact.
4. Choose Export as PDF to save the text messages to your PC or Mac.
5. Email your lawyer and attach the PDF document of your text messages.
6. (Optional) Zip/Compress the PDF and send the text messages to your lawyer via a cloud storage solution.

How to back up just your text messages and not your entire iPhone

In order to send iPhone text messages to your lawyer you first need to back up your iPhone on your computer.

Decipher TextMessage has a custom "Back Up" option that enables you to back up just your text messages and not your entire iPhone. You no longer need iTunes to make a backup!

To back up just your text messages, simply plug your iPhone into your computer, open Decipher TextMessage, and select "Back Up" in the program.

Decipher TextMessage Software for saving texts for your lawyer

Decipher TextMessage is the popular third-party app that lets any iPhone user save and print text messages. The program runs on any Windows or Mac computer.

Decipher TextMessage will automatically look for any existing iPhone backups on your computer and import and organize the messages by device.

The software also lets you export the text messages with metadata such as the time stamp and contact information on every text message sent and received!

Download Decipher Text Message

If you usually have backup encryption turned on for your iPhone backups made in iTunes, Decipher TextMessage will prompt you for your backup password. If you're being asked for a backup password, but you don't remember what yours is, we have some tips to help you remember!

Select the text messages that you want to export from your iPhone.

Select your iPhone in Decipher TextMessage, and then select the contact for which you need to send text messages to your lawyer.

(Optional) How to Merge Multiple Conversations

If you're like me, sometimes you accidentally iMessage people using their email address instead of their phone number. Or your contact may have a separate work phone. You may need to merge together multiple "contacts" into one cohesive conversation. You can select multiple contacts by holding down the Command key (Mac) or the Ctrl key (Windows) while selecting the contacts. Decipher TextMessage will merge the multiple messages into a cohesive conversation using the date and times of the messages.

Tip: You can use the text field above the center column to filter your contacts. Type in part of a phone number, email address, and/or name and press enter to filter your contacts to only those containing your criteria.)

Export Your iPhone Text Messages as a PDF

• With your needed text messages visible in the right side of the screen, press the Export button.

• Select Export Current Conversation > PDF.

• Select the folder on your computer where you would like to save the PDF file. Pick a spot that's easy to get to, like the Downloads folder or your Desktop.

Tip: If you only need text messages from a certain range of dates, select PDF (Date Range). You'll be prompted to select the dates/times you want to export messages for. This can be handy if you have a very long text message thread with the recipient, but only need messages spanning a shorter range of time.

(Optional) If you need the full-size image/video attachments, instead of exporting the conversation as a PDF file, choose the HTML Archive option.

• You'll be asked where you want to save the folder containing the text transcript and the folder of image, video, and other attachments. I like to pick somewhere easy for me to access, like the Downloads folder or my Desktop.

• Decipher TextMessage will export the iPhone-formatted text message transcript, along with the needed attachments.

• After the export completes, Decipher TextMessage will reveal/select the exported folder in Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac).

• Right-click on the exported folder, and select Send To > Compressed (zipped) folder (Windows) or Compress name of folder (Mac).

• After the compression completes, you'll have a zip file selected now that you need to send to your attorney!

Send Your Exported iPhone Text Messages to Your Attorney

Due to all of the image and video attachments in your exported messages, the resulting file could be too large to send via email. (Most email providers have a size limit around 5-10 MB.) So, you may need another way to securely send your large file to your attorney.

Here are some suggestions:

Please note that we are not your legal counsel, and if you have privacy concerns, you should discuss the method of transport with your attorney

1. If you see your attorney in person, use a thumb drive to bring the file(s) to his/her office.

2. Ask your attorney or lawyer if they have a file inbox for large files.

3. If you have space available in your iCloud account, you can upload your file(s) to iCloud Files and share it with your attorney from there.

4. Upload your zip file to Dropbox, and share the file with your attorney. If you don't have a Dropbox account, use this referral link to get an extra 500MB of space when you set up your account.
   We recommend sharing the file with your attorney by using Dropbox's share feature, rather than generating a public link to your file to email. If the privacy of your exported messages is of no concern, then a public URL sent via email is acceptable.

5. Upload your zip file to a box.com account and then share the file with your attorney via email. We recommend sharing the file via email rather than generating a public link.

6. Upload the file to Google Drive and then share the Google Drive link via Gmail. Again, if the privacy of your messages conversation is important, you should consider sharing the permissions to the file only to the email recipients.

Sending text messages to your laywer - Video instructions

You can follow along with our video that will walk you through each step of preparing and sending your text messages to your lawyer for court or other legal reasons.

Click on the video below to see the step-by-step instructions to print text messages and iMessages for your lawyer or court or trial.