Family Law Case Example

This matter was in the family court to decide custody of two young children.

We were jointly instructed by a Borough Council Legal Services Team and the other parties Solicitors to conduct a forensic analysis of a mobile phone belonging to the father of the children.

The Brief

The father stated he was no longer in a relationship with the mother, who Social Services claimed was unfit to look after the children adequately, and as such the father was seeking custody of the children.

Our Analysis

We were instructed to extract all communications between the parties during a three month period.

Using specialist forensic tools the following data was recovered from the father’s Samsung Galaxy mobile phone;

  • Contacts – 1,088 (325 deleted)
  • Calls – 1,152 (29 deleted)
  • SMS – 30,000 (4,036 deleted)
  • MMS – 406 (7 deleted)
  • Chat Messages – 7,185 (16 deleted)
  • Images – 43,074 (2,017 deleted)
  • Audio – 1,690 (153 deleted)
  • Video – 442 (77 deleted)
  • Locations – 1,252
  • Web History – 1,2065 (2 deleted)
  • Searches – 3,923 (32 deleted)

These included one hundred and eighty (180) calls, two (2) chat messages, two hundred and eighty four (284) multimedia messages (MMS), one thousand six hundred and seventy six (1,676) text messages (SMS) between the mother and the father.

The Result

Our report, completed within 24 hours, showed that the content of the recovered messages clearly demonstrated an ongoing relationship between the pair and the volatile nature of that relationship.

This report allowed the court to make the correct informed decision in the best interest of the children.