HISTORY OF SMS / TXT
The SMS (Short Message Service a/k/a Text Messaging) concept was first developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. The first text message was sent years later on December 3rd, 1992 from Neil Papworth, a former developer at Sema Group Telecoms
In today’s day and age, a great deal of much of communication is using TXT or SMS messaging. One report in the early 2020s was that 27,000,000,000 messages are sent each day.
RECORD KEEPING OF MESSAGES
Even small law firms receive thousands of SMS messages every year from clients. This means attorneys and staff members need to review, and in some cases re-review SMS messages costing clients hundreds and thousands of dollars in legal fees. Of course, Law Firms desire clients to get value out of service, and of course clients desire to lower costs and both want to be able to use SMS messages in court. This help page will do the following:
- Lowering Legal Fees
- Increase the likelihood that SMS messages can be used in court
FILE FORMAT
The worse way to send the firm SMS messages is embedded in an email or also known as in-line within the email. Attachments as image files are best. When saving the files, they should be renamed in a logical format. Our firm suggests the following format: four-digit year, a dash, two-digit month, a dash, two-digit day, a dash, and sequence number with the same number of digits using leading zeros. An example would be 2020-01-02-0001 for a set of text messages that the first message was sent in 2020 on January 2. The reason this is the best format is that when resaved in our system they can be sorted by file name and the attorney and staff can go from file to file to review in the order of the messages.
Also, it is important to provide within the body of the email or an MS Word document explaining WHO the messages are between and who is on the right and left sides of the messages. Also, a must is what the sequence of messages is representing, or what you are trying to show the attorney. Even better is in the narrative making pinpoints to the specific file name (sequence number)
DO NOT PROVIDE IMAGES IN A “HEIC” FORMAT AS THIS FORMAT ONLY CAN BE VIEWED BY APPLE DEVICES. IF USING AN APPLE, MAKE SURE THE FILE DOES NOT END IN “.HEIC”. YOU CAN NOT JUST RENAME THE FILE, BUT MUST SAVE THE IMAGE IN ANOTHER FORMAT
WHAT SHOULD BE IN SCREENSHOT
The best is if you can remove from your phone directory the number of the person before saving screenshots. The reason for this is simple, some Courts know the game some people play of having messages sent between friends to make it appear the conversation is between others, and by placing someone else’s name in the phone directory the image appears to be from the person who they label in their directory. By removing the phone number from the directory, it will show the TRUE telephone number that the message was from.
Next is to start the sequence of messages with the date of the messages. Our firm has found that Courts like this as it shows when the conversation started. Also important is to use overlapping messages in the screenshot. For example: If the bottom of the file called 2020-01-02-0001 has the message “we should go to the park on Sunday, what do you think about this”, the file called 2020-01-02-0002 should have the last line of that message, “we should go to the park on Sunday, what do you think about this”. This does not mean the entire message, just the last line of the message. This will allow the courts to see nothing is missing and what goes logically in order.
REQUIRED
Now does our firm require you to provide us with messages in this format, no (in most cases), but be aware that the more you do follow these guidelines the less you spend in legal fees in reviewing and understanding the messages and searching for messages later. In most cases the messages are stored in our system with the file names you provide, thus not renaming in a logical order requires in many cases, spending billable hours searching for text messages to see what order messages go in and looking later for the messages when needed for court.
COST We all know time is money. The question is, do you want to take the time to do the work to use this logical format or spend more on legal fees? As a reminder, we can require additional retainers. While our firm is willing to take all the time needed. This help page is designed to get the most out of your legal dollars, hundreds and thousands of dollars in many cases.