The communication history between people is important in all litigation cases. Think of all the people you text or that text you instead of calling. In both business and personal relationships, many of us rely more on texts than phone calls. Thus, they are increasingly playing an outsize role in litigation for their evidentiary value.
What Kind of Evidence Can you Get from Text Message Forensics?
There are many reasons that you may want to use text messages in court and in settlement negotiations. With our text message evidence collection and Evidence Reports, you can quickly review for any hot issues in your custody, divorce, support, or other dispute. For example:
- Demonstrate who sent a text message and when.
- Some text messages have GPS data attached and can show where someone was when they sent or received it.
- If a text message included a photo attachment, you will see those as well.
- In a Family Law case, text message history may uncover hidden assets, support claims of abuse, or custodial interference.
- In an Employment Law case, texts may be critical to claims of wrongful termination, sexual harassment, or racial discrimination.
- Provide context to show alibi, motive, or intent in a criminal case.
Mobile Phone Evidence and Forensics
Can I Use Text Messages as Evidence in Court?
Yes! However, texts are not automatically admissible. While a screenshot of a text message thread may work in some informal settings, it is unlikely to survive challenges to authenticity. In federal court, evidence admissibility is governed by the federal rules of evidence. Once you’ve established relevancy and gotten around any hearsay challenges, mobile forensics can help you authenticate the evidence.
To ensure your text messages survive challenges to authenticity, you want to get a forensic image of the phone as soon as possible using a digital forensic expert. This will preserve all potentially relevant ESI on the device.
Our Desktop Evidence Reports make it easy to review all text messages on a device for relevance, and we Bates stamp each item while also providing the source file and PDFs. We can quickly create exhibits of your text messages for use at trial or settlement negotiations.
Easy Text Message Legal Review
We provide Evidence Reports with a list of the most important text messages, in an easy to review format. You will be able to sort and filter all the texts by who sent or received the text. Or, you can filter the data and look at a specific date range. In fact, you can choose specific search terms to highlight, or even limit the review to only those texts with your key search terms. This functionality will make it easy to quickly find the evidence that is most relevant to your case.
Can You Recover Deleted Text Messages?
Often, yes. Similar to emails, texting is so common now, that text messages are used in all types of cases. However, many people mistakenly think that if they delete a message then it is gone forever. Not true. Even if you delete a text, chances are that it can still be recovered through a variety of means. For example, forensic data recovery services often uncover previously deleted texts and photos. Alternatively, if your client or key witness deleted a text conversation, it may still reside on the other participant’s phone. Or further still, you might find it backed up online in iCloud.
How Much Does it Cost to Get Text Message Evidence into Court?
Fees begin at $375 and can go up to $1,175 to secure evidence from a mobile phone. With our flat fees, you can trust that you will have a defensible evidence collection to avoid authentication challenges in court. The exact fee will depend on whether you need an evidence report for legal review and production to opposing counsel. You can see all our flat fees here, including for email accounts, photos, videos from phones, computers, or cloud accounts.
Remote Collection Services Wherever You Are
We handle the data extraction remotely with our Remote Collection Unit. This means we will ship you our BlackBox and conduct the forensics examination remotely. Then you return the BlackBox to us using our pre-paid shipping label and box. Once complete, we provide you with an Evidence Report for easy legal review.
Text Message Programs & Accounts We Support
We can provide you with text messages as evidence from almost all types of accounts and services. Here is a list of the most common types:
- SMS
- iMessage
- Cloud
- And many more!