![]() There’s an app for just about anything these days, and so it’s no surprise to find specialized software for exporting text messages from smartphones. Each multimedia message app has its own format that is constantly evolving which means there’s no standard formatting between any non-SMS messages. ![]() IMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, Twitter direct message, and SnapChat - internet based messaging - have overtaken the classic plain SMS message and for good reason: modern messages in these applications are not limited to the short length and are media-rich, typically including audio/video, images, links to websites, etc. blue for Apple’s own iMessages, for example. are differentiated on smartphones from other messaging, shown in green on the iPhone’s Messages app vs.can include some multimedia content, like images and audio, although size is restricted, and.use the cell network rather than the Internet,.have a maximum length of 160 characters - less in Cyrillic, right-to-left and other Asian languages,.Text Messages – what they are and how they work.Ĭlassic cell phone text messaging, before the advent of smartphones and still extremely widely used today, is the the SMS or “Short Message Service”. Lastly, we’ll take a quick look at some practical considerations and text message review. As we all know, text messages are ubiquitous and candid, less formal than email, shorter, quicker and more likely to draw a response - quickly - and therefore, for better or for worse, less guarded! Moreover, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34, “electronically stored information” (ESI) is discoverable if it is “stored in any medium” from which it can be obtained “either directly or, if necessary, after translation … into a reasonably usable form.” So, when it comes to litigation and investigations, since text messages being ESI are subject to discovery by opposing parties and as it’s rare a case does not embody the thought, mood, and actions of all the players involved, in almost all instances, text messages - both your own client’s and the opposing party’s - should be top of mind, just like emails.īefore we touch on strategies for obtaining and producing text messages, a practice that’s becoming more mainstream in the civil discovery landscape every year, let’s first pry them open and see what makes them tick, and then look at some simple tools to export text messages from iPhone and Android smartphones. What is new, is that in business dealings, what was the occasional is the now the new normal: besides “formal” discourse via email, it is often in the parallel, extemporaneous trail of text messages where “real” negotiations happen. In family law and personal injury law, text messaging (and of course, social media postings) have long been ripe for all kinds of relevant evidence - infidelity, harassment, fraud and what have you. Courts have been requiring text message preservation and production as standard fare for the last several years. Lawyers may think that considering text messages (or WhatsApp and similar messaging systems) in the discovery process is ho-hum.
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