Presenting messages in court

Timestamps and time zones in text-message evidence

Last reviewed 2026-10-17 · 2 official sources cited below

When a case turns on when something was said (a missed deadline, a late pickup, a message sent after a court order), timestamps matter. Different exports record time in different ways.

WhatsApp: local time, no time zone

A WhatsApp text export writes each message with the phone’s local date and time, for example 12/29/23, 1:15 PM. The file doesn’t say which time zone that is. If the phone was set to New York time, that’s New York time. If the person travelled, or the phone’s clock was changed, the times shift with it. Day/month order and 12/24-hour format follow the phone’s region settings.

What to do:

• Write down the phone’s time zone and region settings when you export.
• In TextExhibits, choose that time zone. The cover page states that the times are “as written by the exporting device” and records the declared time zone. The tool does not convert WhatsApp times, because it can’t know the true zone.
• If people in the chat were in different time zones, everyone’s messages are still shown in the exporting phone’s local time.

SMS Backup & Restore: exact instants

SMS Backup & Restore stores each message’s date as a Java timestamp in milliseconds, i.e. an exact instant (see SyncTech’s field documentation). TextExhibits converts these to the time zone you choose and prints the UTC offset on each message, such as 2024-03-09 11:00:00 UTC-05:00, so daylight-saving changes are explicit.

CSV exports

It depends on the tool. If a date column includes an offset (2024-01-15T08:01:12-05:00) or is an epoch number, it’s an exact instant and is converted. Otherwise it’s treated like WhatsApp: shown as written, with your declared time zone on the cover page.

Ambiguous dates (03/04/2024)

Is that March 4 or April 3? TextExhibits decides from the file itself. If any first number is above 12, the format must be day/month. If not, it picks the reading that keeps messages in time order. If it still can’t tell, it says so and lets you choose. Always check a few messages against the phone.

Presenting times in court

• Use one time zone throughout the document, and say which.
• If timing is disputed, prepare a short table of the key messages with their times and zones.
• Don’t convert times by hand in the transcript. Explain any conversion separately.

Sources

1. WhatsApp Help Center — How to export your chat history
2. SyncTech — Fields in SMS Backup & Restore XML backup files

Sources were opened and checked on 2026-10-17. Laws and rules change; always read the current version.