How to Use Text Messages in Court

As you can imagine, the way that we communicate in this day and age has changed the way that judges, attorneys, and the court system operate. I’ll put it this way: clients these days put a lot more in writing than they used to!

If you have text messages on your phone that could be used in court, then your attorney will need you to download or screenshot those messages for printing. (Yes, we still use paper in the courtroom.)

Ideally, you would have one long PDF file of your entire conversation with the other party. Then you would send that PDF to your attorney along with a list of the most relevant texts that they should see. This way, all of the messages are in order, time-and-date stamped, and have context. What a dream! Unfortunately, this isn’t very easy to do.

If you have an iPhone AND a Mac computer, then all you have to do is open the Messages app on your computer, choose the conversation you want to print, then press COMMAND+P and choose Save as PDF. Voila!

If you don’t have an iPhone and a Mac computer, then you will likely have to download a program to get your entire conversation from your phone to your computer. Clients report success with iMazing, which you download to your COMPUTER and works with iPhone.

If you don’t have a computer, then your only option is to screenshot your messages and email them to me. When screenshotting, try not to have much overlap, and try to get times and dates in there as much as possible. Please keep your messages organized by re-naming the files or keeping them in folders with dates. I use Google Drive and so you are welcome to upload the messages in an organized fashion to a Google Drive folder and share it with me. Please also feel free to give me any notes to provide context to the messages.

If you want to take it a (very helpful) step further, then you can stitch your messages together using this app for your phone, which will organize all your messages into a PDF file for me. I love it! It only costs $2.99. Be sure to choose the option of PDF - Multiple Pages as shown below.

If you cannot figure it out, that’s ok. Just send what you have to the attorney in the best order that you can. No one is perfect!

Organization is the key to success in life and in court. Make your attorney’s life easier (and your case better) by trying some of the suggestions above. You’ll be glad you did.