For various reasons its been challenging to find time to blog lately, but I thought this little how to guide would be quick to pop up, and that it might be of use to family lawyers and litigants who need to produce evidence of exchanges on WhatsApp. It can be very tiresome to have to screenshot and scroll through screeds of material, which increases page count, is difficult to follow and often features duplication or missed bits (intentionally or otherwise).

Whilst this method won’t retrieve intentionally deleted messages as a phone download by an expert might, it can be useful, particularly where the download of both ‘sides’ of a chat can be compared to identify if one party has deleted something inconvenient to them, as long as that message is retained on the download of the other party (sometimes a whatsapp message can be deleted for all parties, but as far as I understand it only if that deletion is done almost immediately after sending. Later deletions only seem to have effect on the device they are deleted from so should still show in the chat download of receiving device).

This method won’t be suitable in all cases, but it only takes a couple of minutes to do and is obviously much cheaper than the instruction of an expert. If the download is carried out by a legal professional and emailed directly to their computer a statement could be produced to confirm that the resulting .txt file itself has not been edited or tampered with before its introduction into the proceedings.

Instructions to download a Whatsapp chat thread

1. Go into the relevant chat thread.
2. Click on the name of the chat in the white bar across the top of the screen
3. You will see a ‘Group Info’ or ‘Contact Info’ page (depending on whether the chat is with 2 or more people)
4. Scroll right down to the bottom of the page that appears, and click on ‘export chat’
5. Select ‘attach media’ option to export images as well as text
6. this will generate a zip folder which you can send by email or save.
7. Inside the zip folder will be a .txt file with all messages in chronological order (the whole chat), and separately any attached images. The .txt file will preserve any emojis that have been used.