How to Get Texts Admitted as Evidence in Court

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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Music:
Love Aside – Patrick Patrikios
Music provided via YouTube Studio Audio Library

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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[ozziegee]

I don’t get into trouble but you just got a new sub for these cool help tips

[WallFlower]

As Always @Matthew Harris, Great advice Sir👏😎

[SleepwalkFan]

Very interesting 👍 I am so glad I found your channel.

[debbie]

I thought I had seen this before, but I didn't see where I hit like or left a comment. So I have my ears on and eyes open. Only 6+ minutes? C'mon Matthew, I will be going to see an Attorney this week and in Court in the middle of October. I won't be using screen shots, and I remember what you said about how to dress for Court. Please give me more information! (It's Probate Court.)

[lukecoolest]

Love the content just wish it was easier to find content like this but for Canada, all the good informational videos on such things I stumble across are all for the US

[theantipodalcast]

Hi Matthew. Thank you for the advice. What is your opinion if you have pieces of a conversation from another persons device (the key moments of the conversation) and suponea the person who owns had that conversation to authenticate the context and its authenticity?

[NataliesChatalie]

Damn, practical information. Thank you!

[Qazqi]

Note about the blurring, yours seems to be mostly readable through the blur. For the purposes of just showing a jury, all you need to do is make sure the blur is unquestionably strong enough, or redact it with something like a black box. In this context, you _shouldn't_ have to worry about a malicious party getting hold of the image and trying to uncover the number—in that scenario, you're best off with a black box and a plain image format (i.e., one that doesn't save the full number _and_ save the black box on top, just the final image).

[savannahmoore]

Hi Matthew,
Regarding text messages—
If the screenshot only has the person’s name listed and not the phone number, is that something to object to because of lack of authenticity?

[WilliamW]

I wouldn't just use the last line, I would use the whole message UNLESS the message itself takes up multiple pages (yes, there are people that will send you a full novel in a text) and at that point, I would do at least 3 lines. But this is good info.

[paulstelian]

I assume that sometimes it's clearer to overlap two lines instead of just one, and there should never be a reason to overlap more than two (other than at the end of the conversation, perhaps)? (my guess: if you overlap more than you need to you make more screenshots, increasing the bulk of the evidence unnecessarily?)

[nonyabiz]

Is there a right to see a magistrate in Texas BEFORE police takinging to jail? Plz talk about that

[JP-nzem]

what about video? Can i record my neighbors while they are verbally abuse toward me in their backyard? They have metal fence so it's see through. Will this be considered invading their privacy while they are in their backyard? Thank you so much.

[alkeryn]

I don't see how the can be used as proof as anyone with technical know how could edit them.

[LatriciaWorrick-tobw]

Is Stephanie Suppers in here? From Texas law school?

[TamraDevine]

How do you print them out? Can you only have one message per page? If you can have more than one per page, can you fill up the whole page with texts or only one on top of the other? Would that be formatted to be read top to bottom and then move to the right (column to the right)? Or would they need to be right to left and then move down to the next row?

[JudeWeraduwage]

Are screenshots by themselves a reliable form of evidence if they can be doctored easily?

[Mastermindlife]

drakes momMA...bro must be a kendrick ghost rider lmao
HE KNEW 7 months ago lmao

everybody say OOOVHOEEE.

[dmoney]

How do you get evidence admitted after discovery but over 30 days before trial?

[hiho]

Any digital conversation can be easily faked in a screenshot, I could do it myself. With the technical know-how you should be able to insert them in messaging apps yourself, unless they rely on an external server for storage. And even when that's the case, you can usually still delete the messages so they don't show up in the logs. What do you do if the other party denies ever sending those messages and accuses you of fabricating them?