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good morning so as Kelly said I Marley Smith Pearson and I am Lawrence Lawrence you will be tested on the pronunciation of Larry's last name at the end that's one of the pop up question and we're going to be focusing on digital evidence electronic evidence in family law cases today generally we're going to be talking about text messages social media and voicemails I want to encourage you to ask questions throughout the presentation and not save them for the end please send anything in that you've been waiting to discuss and we may not know the answer but we can at least you know talk about what we think about the questions and let me see if I can work this great so when dealing with electronic evidence the number one rule that you want to remember is to preserve the evidence as soon as possible and make backup copies I believe that anyone no matter how long or how short of a time they've been practicing has had a client whose phone was dropped in water the screen cracked they lost their phone their carrier turned off their service you know any number of things happen quite often where people are going to lose their electronic data so it's very important to make sure that as soon as the client contacts you get that electronic evidence and try and get it multiple times in multiple forms because we all know how trials work out and sometimes it's good to just have a back-up plan I have to use my mouse instead of my keypad to change the thing so how do you preserve this electronic evidence for text messages and this applies to text messages on someone's phone it applies to social media media messaging apps like Facebook messenger Instagram direct messages what's app emails really any way that people are communicating directly through a written form there's a couple things that you want to look out for when you are preserving this evidence to use in court the best way to preserve text messages is getting a screenshot directly from the clients phone sometimes a client is not able to do that they don't understand how their phone or their computer doesn't have that capability and the next best thing to do is take another phone and take an actual photograph of the clients phone with the message displayed what's important is what is going to be in that text message and the photograph you want to make sure that you get the entire content that you get the date and time that the message was received and you get the telephone or the sender's information to go into those things a little more in-depth for the content you want to make sure that you get the entire message and the entire conversation so you know when you are speaking with your client and they send you just one screenshot you want to have a conversation with them what's on either side of that conversation ask for their consent if you can look and see what else is in that conversation and whether you think it's important to have and it's also important to have a frank conversation with your client and ask if they deleted any messages sometimes a client will delete things that they sent that they believe are unflattering or hurt their case things like that and want to make sure that you know what's missing to prepare for that when you come to port and your opposing party pulls out their phone and there is a string of conversations that you weren't prepared for so if your client have you know they tell you yes I did delete part of the conversation there are apps that you can use generally for a thief that can download entire message histories even if the message has been deleted in addition to getting the entire contents of the message you're generally going to need more than one screenshot and it's going to be a multiple page photograph or document when you're taking those screenshots you're going to want to try and overlap the conversation so that you have a little piece of the the previous page on the second page so that you can imagine if you print out all of these pages and you go to the printer in your office and somebody had dumped them all on the floor you would be able to put them back together even though they've been put out of out of order so it want you want to make it easy to to be able to know what part of the conversation is where for capturing the time and date that the message was received if you are following the first rule of preserving evidence early and often you may have a client who comes in shortly after a communication and if they take the screenshot that day the date and time will display on their phone as today or yesterday I would encourage you to still get that text message that day they come in because it's better to have it saying today than nothing but then the next time they come in try and take it take a second screenshot where it displays an actual date instead of today or yesterday generally on the phones you have to wait a couple days to where it displays the actual date and then finally you want to make sure that you capture the sender's information often in our phones on other like on social media things like that people are going to use nicknames sometimes they are unflattering especially if you're doing this in some sort of custody situation I've had a client who had her child's father in her phone a sperm donor so there's two issues when you have an unflattering contact information one is what we're going to talk about authentication and authorization the communication and it'll say from sperm donor but then you're going to want to go into the client's phone or into the social media profile page to show the contact information for sperm donor right so you show that the name given in the phone is an unflattering name but it's connected to this phone number or you know they use a nickname on their social media account but it's connected to this profile same with an email sometimes it just comes up with a name but you want to go and capture that email address from the other issue beyond the authentication which we're going to get a little more into is that there's the ethical issue of changing it you know if if you're gonna go into a custody case and there's an unflattering name for the child's father you may be concerned about how that's going to appear to the judge so have you ever thought about asking the client to change the phone numbers contact name in their phone and then taking screenshots I know I've wanted to Larry what do you think about that well because the ultimate question and the authentication of these messages is whether this is a fair and accurate representation of the message that they received right at that time I don't think the client can honestly say yes to that question if they have alter the contact name so I think if they do change it then at some point in your directive the client like it's going to come out that they change the contact name I would I would feel ethically obliged and make sure that that information came down came out so that would then ultimately defeat the whole purpose of changing in the first place i I think that it is what it is you're stuck with that unflattering nickname and we'll have to maybe you know had the client explain a little bit about why they entered the nickname the way they did to try to mitigate that damage exactly so you have gotten your electronic evidence that's great you have it ready to go to court how are you going to get it into evidence for the actual screenshots the photos that you're bringing into the courtroom it's pretty basic you're going to lay a foundation as you would for any photograph where you're going to have the client you know describe what it is and then the ultimate question is this a fair and accurate representation of the message that you receive on X dates but the issue is a little more complicated when we get to the question of authorship and authentication of the actual communication contained in the photograph so authorship who sent that text message is a question of authentication under Pennsylvania Rule of Evidence 901 901 have a pretty low standard for admitting evidence generally it's just that the proponent demonstrates that the item is what they claim it is and in the common in the situation of electronic communications here you are the proponent and really what you're saying is you're offering this communication this message as having being written and sent by person X how do you show that it was written and sent by person X so there is some case law on this starting in 2005 with in the interest of FP the court discussed electronic evidence in general finding that it's not inherently more unreliable than non electronic evidence and that the the most important holding in this is that 901 applies to electronic evidence and that circumstantial evidence or circumstantial evidence of authorship can be is sufficient to authenticate so what types of circumstantial circumstantial evidence are enough in Commonwealth versus coach or Koch and Commonwealth versus Mangal we get two cases showing us what's not enough and I think it's important when you read these cases to read them with the lens that it is a criminal prosecution and in family law cases we often have it a little easier than a prosecutor because generally our parties know each other so in Commonwealth vs. Koch we're talking about text messages and here the court found that where the defendant owned a cell phone and they could prove he owned the cell phone but not that he sent the messages or he wrote the messages that's not sufficient just ownership of a device is insufficient circumstantial evidence to prove authorship and authentication and then similarly in Commonwealth vs. main goal we have Facebook messages here a detective found a social media account a Facebook account that belongs to a particular person and the account had his same name his hometown with high school but the court said that the message is sent from that Facebook account there wasn't enough evidence to show that this defendant sent the messages on that Facebook account so these cases would make it seem like authentication is actually a pretty high bar but I would argue that they've done that in family law cases where the parties know each other they set out kind of circumstantial evidence that you really just have to identify the person who's sending the message and luckily the court has caught on and decided to qualify some of this case law and give a little more guidance to practitioners about how to deal with this question of authentication and so it was recently announced that the rule 901 is being amended and in effective October 1st 2020 there's going to be a new subsection to 901 the new subsection is 901 V 11 and it is specifically dealing with digital evidence and the court has said that to connect digital evidence to a person you can use direct evidence such as testimony of a person with knowledge or circumstantial evidence such as identifying content or proof of ownership possession control or access to a device or account at the time when corroborate winged corroborated by circumstances indicating authorship and the comments to the rule or the amendment to the rule are very helpful and they really you can see some of this case law just being codified into the comments so it defines digital evidence in a broad sense so really any communication statement or image existing an electronic medium so that's going to include email sex massive social media things like that this is an important thing that I think some judges often get confused about but the comments make clear that the proponent of the digital evidence is not required that no one else could have been the author and so you do not have to disprove that the neighbor came didn't come into the house while your client was taking a shower and send this message right you just have to show that more likely than not person X offered this text message you don't have to eliminate the entire universe of other people who could have authored it and then they give examples of what direct evidence can be it could be the opposing party admitting that they made this statement or possibly a third party witness who observed the opposing party send the message and then examples of circumstantial evidence are identifying content such as self-identification distinctive characteristics and then circumstantial evidence sorry oh and then they do highlight that possession alone of the device is insufficient and that's your Commonwealth vs. Koch holding that you have to have possession of the device plus some indication of authorship just to be clear the other example there I made that up under direct evidence I'm just trying to think of some other example of direct direct evidence it's not actually in the comments oh thank you a good example so what does this look like in practice what I like to do is work it out with my client when the client comes in and they have these text messages we go through them and human beings do this naturally like we receive digital information and we are able to process the information that we receive and know where it comes from the hard part is verbalizing what we do naturally and so I will talk to my client and in cases where they have received communications the you know they've been smooth or they've used blocked numbers things like that I will ask them directly how do you know it was the opposing party and they generally will be able to say something but if they're having a hard time verbalizing how they knew who it was I will often ask the reverse how do you know somebody didn't steal his phone and send this text message to you how do you know it wasn't someone else and when framed in that way your client is often going to have that golden nugget that will just cook your authentication for you like oh he used this nickname or he spoke in half Creole half English which is how he always talks you know so use your clients to get you to the authentication don't try and come up with this by yourself but examples of things that will help you authenticate this digital evidence is the names on the account if there's a profile picture attached to the account you can use more than just the conversation that you're trying to get in maybe three days before the threatening text message there was a text message that self identifies and a self identification is often where a person will you know identify themselves through a relationship like my son my uncle or they will identify themselves through a event that we know happen like why'd you call the cops on me yes turday or you know what were we doing at the McDonald's when you you know XY and Z so things like identifying themselves through events or relationships to other persons are often very good ways to connect the message and the sender to more defendant these kind of your your golden ticket parts of the message are sometimes going to be a little farther back or forward in the message history which is what I like to go over with my client before you get in there and say how are we going to connect it and I look through some of the conversation a little before and a little after Larry do you have any other examples of tying conversation to a person yeah I mean the one that comes to mind there was a case where the messages were sort of the crux of the case I think I think was a PFA matter so there were these threats that I think we're coming through sort of old-fashioned SMS text messages and we did exactly what you said we went back into the history of those text messages and the golden ticket as you the metaphor you were using were photographs that the opposing party had taken of a deceased relative so you took a photograph of a photograph of this deceased relative and sent it to the client so you know you were with those that past history of messaging we've already substantially narrow down the the universe of possible authors here and yeah I mean that's obviously great evidence of authorship and was certainly enough to get us over the authentication hurdle and then one thing that I wanted to highlight before I turn it over to Larry is I have had some some judges in PSA cases pushback against my reliance on Commonwealth versus Koch and mingle and they're saying that those are criminal cases they're not helpful in family law cases or civil cases and I just want to highlight that a Superior Court opinion expressing and expounding on the rules of evidence is applicable and applicable in both civil and criminal the rules of evidence apply the same in civil and criminal so those cases if you get pushed back really do apply and they deserve the same wait for their propositions in a civil case as they do in a criminal case if I could just interrupt here this is Kelly I'm gonna launch the first of the CLE polls if you can just respond yes or no attorneys this will be available for one minute and please feel free to go on with the presentation thank you sure so this is where I take over Harley yep okay so voicemails you like this is like becoming less and less of a thing but still you may at some point have an important voicemail that you want to enter into evidence so how to preserve this can actually be a little bit tricky if we're just talking about quality of the voicemail itself then some phones are able to export that voicemail as an audio file right and that's you know that's gonna get you the best audio quality and as our Lee was saying number one rule preserved early and and often you know I would recommend if that is an option to to use it even if that's not ultimately the thing that you end up you know playing for the court because at least you have that backup in case something something does go wrong the issue is that you still are going to need to link that voicemail to you know the date and time that it was received and the audio file more likely than not is not going give you that information so another way of preserving a voicemail is a little bit maybe inelegant but it would be to simply play the message on the receiving device you're most likely your clients phone put it on speakerphone and then you use a different device to record it so that's that may solve your issue depending on whether or not whether the phone will read out loud so to speak the envelope information meaning the date and time of receipt but some devices nowadays don't do that actually I don't have an iPhone anymore but I don't think the iPhone can do that right it it'll show visually sort of the entry for the voicemail and have the date and time but there's no way to actually get the device to say out loud the date and time that you could capture an audio recording so the way that I get around that hurdle is simply to just not to use a pure audio recording but you've actually make a video recording so it's the clients phone and your clients finger you know coming into the screen and pressing that particular entry showing the date and time that the message will be received and then it plays and you've captured now both the visual of the date and time that the message was received plus the audio and you know this is important for a lot of different reasons I know lots of judges who actually will reject voicemails or other kinds of electronic evidence if it isn't linked to a particular date and time I don't know if you have those kinds of judges in your jurisdiction but if you do then it's obviously very important but also can we have a lot of just legal significance right so if you're trying to show that you know the opposing party violated a a protection from abuse order then obviously it's going to be important whether or not that message was received after the the order went into effect so so yeah that's that's one you know relatively simple way of recording or preserving the the voicemail in a way that you'll be able to then authenticate it at court yeah and I actually did have I learned this the hard way there was an example where what I had I think it was an iPhone I had the audio on one hand and then screenshots of the the the voicemail entries on the clients phone and opposing counsel did a good job of trying to attack the connection between those two things and I actually ended up having to call the paralegal into the case as a witness to show that you know which which of those voicemail entries connected to the audio and after that I learned my lesson and it was videos from there on out okay you move on team extreme I read a comment that they suggest having a police officer write a report with the date/time and caller information of the voicemail what do you think of that if you have yeah I mean that could potentially work I think that in Philadelphia it would be difficult I mean if you're talking about maybe a detective would have the the time and inclination to just sit down and transcribe a message but then you are going to have the additional problem that you're gonna actually have to call that person into court most likely to to admit the the report into evidence so that's pretty laborious way of doing it for you know just based off of our practice or my practice here in Philadelphia but I suppose that would be a way of solving the issue as well County and we also have a chat that in I guess they don't indicate what County this one is in but they have been granted like Lycoming County they've been granted permission by judges to bring the clients cell phone in as evidence if it's a voice mail babies yes my yeah I think in a pinch that can that can definitely suffice again in Philadelphia my experience has been that most judges they they want to they like to have something to put into the file so you know in in the example of a video recording I would be actually storing that video recording on to something like a either a CD or thumb drive something like that but yes I mean in a pinch I think you can just pass the clients phone up to the judge everybody crowds around I guess the judge and then somebody presses the maybe have the client and press the the appropriate voice message and and then and then play it for the court and then hope it would be captured by the courts a digital recording equipment I do think that I agree with Larry that is possible in a pinch but you also want to think about if you're gonna have to appeal that's not going to make a great appellate record good point yeah okay so voluminous telephone calls and text messages so this is sort of a scenario where it may not be so much the content of for example like you know the SMS text messages or the calls themselves is just that it's this sort of barrage of calls and text messages that you may be using to establish a pattern or course of conduct constituting stalking so I think the best way to present this kind of evidence would be to subpoena the telephone carrier for what is generally referred to as the call detail or text detail so I don't know if people have seen one of these before but it's sometimes actually will come in the format of an Excel spreadsheet or or a similar type of chart and you know it's fairly bare-bones you're getting the date and time of receipt you know when the call was made when the text message was sent and received the receiving number which is going to be more likely than not your clients telephone number sending number probably the opposing party and if we're talking about calls than the duration of the call it's important to note that you are not going to be getting the content of text messages through a text detail it is just the the bare-bones sort of data that I just mentioned and another little note would be when you're subpoenaing these kinds of records to definitely ask for a letter of self authentication that way you don't run into the issue of having to try to subpoena somebody from the telephone carrier to actually appear in person or virtually nowadays as a custodian of record and you know so that would be sort of the the best way of trying to preserve and present that information to the court the next best would be to go back to the screenshot slash photo method going into the call log or the text message log on the clients device and just taking a lots and lots of screenshots but you know that that can be a bit burdensome maybe a little bit difficult to present in court so if you can't get the the call detail or text detail then I think that is the the preferable way of going about it thanks really something to consider when you are dealing with a voluminous telephone call or text message situation is to summarize the important part of the information because you know I'm thinking to some cases in the past where this the the caller text detail was you know 50 50 or more pages long because that's how long the the stalking was going on so it is helpful and and also that call or text detail may capture lots of irrelevant information right so to summarize that information we have the rules of evidence 1001 regarding summaries and you know this doesn't have to be anything particularly fancy really the the crux of these records is how many calls how many text messages were sent from a particular number you know the opposing party to your clients phone receiving number within a certain a certain time range and yeah courts have been more than happy in my experience to to accept a summary of that nature of course you have to make sure that you have the underlying data available for the court and for the opposing party to to review Thanks quick word on blocked calls like this is also something that maybe I have not been running into quite as much but to the extent that people are still using blocked calls there there is a workaround and just be clear I do not own any stock in this company but there's a private company called trap call that you have to pay a monthly subscription I think it's relatively inexpensive maybe I think the basic subscription there's somewhere around $6 a month basically what trap called does is that it reroutes any blocked calls to their own 800 number and for some reason I don't completely understand that our telecommunication systems are set up such that you cannot block your number when you call an 800 number or nine one one so rerouting it to their own 800 number automatically unmasks it and then once the number is unmasked it is then transmitted to the subscribers account and in my experience subpoenaing trap call it's quite easy their subpoena compliance department is very responsive and there will be more than happy to send very official looking looking records showing those unmasked calls and supplying you with a letter of cellphone occation so yeah that's a good workaround if your client is being harassed or stalked through black calls um so I thought we would also spend a little bit of time talking about the wiretapping and electronic surveillance Control Act that Pennsylvania has Pennsylvania is a little bit of an outlier in the United States I don't remember how many other states actually offhand that have the the two-party consent rule as it's generally referred to I think it's just a handful of states including Pennsylvania but the the general idea here is that if you're going to intercept a communication whether that's electronic or oral and we'll get into that distinction a little bit more in a second that it is illegal a felony of the third degree I believe if the the parties to that communication did did not consent and there are some very important exceptions that we're gonna be talking about to that rule but that's that's sort of the general idea now it's as far as well in my experience I have not seen a lot of actual prosecutions of of people for for violating the wiretapping Act making an unauthorized intercept at the communication the way that it seems to generally you know play a role in in cases certainly in family law cases is that it's used to to to exclude evidence right as a the fruit of the poisonous tree so if it was illegally obtained evidence then it's not going to be allowed into evidence in your PFA or custody case Thanks so the first thing that you need to do when you're you know considering wiretapping issues is to figure out whether or not you are dealing with oral or electronic communication so is the thing that was intercepted electronic or oral intercept is defined very broadly any sort of acquisition of the contents of electronic or oral communication using whatever you know method under the Sun right so that would include you know if two people are talking face-to-face right so that would be an oral communication there is no new electronic device is being used to mediate the communication between the two individuals so okay now we're talking about oral communication now if I have a my cell phone in my pocket and I'm using some sort of app whatever and I begin to record that communication that's going to be considered an interception so I'm now intercepting an oral communication let's see an example of an electronic interception would be let's say we're having the same conversation the two people are having the same conversation but now it's happening over a telephone and I as one of the parties to that communication begin to record the the conversation that's happening over the telephone okay so it's happened on the telephone like this electronic my recording using another cell phone or whatever that would qualify as an interception so I'm now intercepting an electronic communication so the way I broke this down if it's oral there is an extra step to the analysis so that will be step number two if you could thanks Riley okay so with oral communications only there is this extra little bit of analysis that you have to do which is to see whether or not the intercepted party to the oral communication had a justified expectation that the communication would not be subject to interception this is a this is a very fact-specific analysis by which I mean if you look at the case law it's hard to discern any sort of like hard and fast rules about when the expectation is justified under the circumstances but some factors that you can consider in making your own arguments about whether something should be coming in or maybe out if you're trying to block it is you know where did the communication happen was it in a setting that is generally associated with you know an expectation of privacy such as one's home or somewhere out in public where that expectation of privacy is going to be either a lot less or perhaps non-existent did the other part do that a person's person or persons know that they were being recorded and continue to speak this is something that comes up in some of the cases and and also in some of my own cases so I can think of some some video recordings of oral communications where the opposing party is standing you know right in front of the client being video recorded and you can hear my client you know announce to to the opposing party that that they're being recorded so you could argue that once they have been informed that they're being recorded that they no longer have a justified expectation that they're not being recorded because they were told and at least anything that comes after that announcement should be allowed under the the wiretapping Act another factor to consider if there were third parties present right so if there are a bunch of other people around then what is really the expectation of privacy there and did the other person make their own recording of the communication that was something I came in one of the cases that was sort of a slam dunk that the person did did not have a justified expectation since they were busy making their own recording of the the oral communication Thanks so again step two that's only for oral communication step three is for is for for all kinds of communication so if the if the participants to the electronic or oral communication did give prior consent to the interception then of course it's fine now there may be some evidentiary questions about whether or not that consent was given or not so for example and the example that I just gave about the client you know recording a conversation oral communication conversation going on between herself and the opposing party you know if if that announcement that she was making the recording wasn't part of the recording and she you know she says that I announced it just before I began making the recording now we have a potential area question of you know can we show that can we convince the judge that the announcement was made or not if yes then perhaps that would be sufficient to show consent but if we have consent then yes there's no problem the interception is legal and the evidence is admissible if if we can't show that there was prior consent then all is not necessarily lost we still have one last possible option to bring the evidence into the case can I ask you a question Larry yeah of course what if it's kind of an equivocal response to one party announcing I'm reporting and the other party says whatever what what do you do with that Oh Harley yeah I mean I think that I think I would probably try first to argue not so much consent I think that I would try because we're talking about an oral communication so I think I would try to say that this is not an oral communication the way that it is defined under the Act because that person did not have a justified expectation that the communication was not being intercepted and so it doesn't qualify as an oral communication the way that the Act defines it so it's not even covered by the Act and therefore the evidence comes in as opposed to trying to argue that the person had given this sort of you know yeah equivocal kind of consent I think that would be the stronger argument of the two excellent keeping me on my toes so there is this other exception to the wiretapping Act that I think is actually a slightly less known by practitioners so I think it's important to point out so section 5704 parentheses 11 did the intercepting party so the person making the recording or whatever have a reasonable suspicion that the intercepted party so most likely the opposing party is committing about to commit or has committed a crime of violence and did they have a reason to believe that the evidence of the crime evidence may be obtained from the interception and if the answer to this question is yes then the interception is legal and admissible and if no then it's it's not coming in so okay so what is a crime of violence of course it is defined by the Act and it's a relatively lengthy list most of these things are you know what you would sort of expect I think to see in a definition of crime of violence so your your murder or manslaughter and so forth the two the two entries here that I'd like to think about a little bit though is the intimidation of witness or victim and retaliation against witness victim or party Harley if you could move to the next line thanks Rex Oh intimidation retaliation intimidation is in the the criminal context right so different kinds of behavior that are you know designed to intimidate a witness to interfere with the criminal that would the prosecution of a criminal case and then retaliation being in the civil context you know trying to get somebody essentially not to pursue a civil matter through the use of some kind of retaliatory action so the reason that I want to highlight this is that I think if you have if you have a client with either a criminal stay away order or a no contact protection from abuse order I think it's it arguably any communication from the restrained person the defendant and a criminal or PFA mater can create a reasonable suspicion that that opposing party is committing or about to commit the crime of intimidation or retaliation because they are violating these orders that are meant to protect your client from that from that defendant so if we have a reasonable suspicion that one of these crimes is about to be committed or rather the because the communication itself right is the suspected crime it would also stand to reason that it's reasonable to believe that the interception of the communication will obtain evidence of the crime which is sort of the second prong of this crime of violence exception and I have made this argument at least once I think maybe twice successfully in PFA matters and I was able to bring in interceptions of electronic communications the example that it's most rarely comes to mind was a telephone call in violation of a no-contact protection from abuse order where my client basically recorded that call with a separate device and that would normally be prohibited under the bar tapping act she did not announce or otherwise you know obtain the consent of the opposing party and making that making that telephone call but the the judge did agree with my argument that it fell under the crime of violence exception and particularly the retaliation part of that definition and I think I just answered Daniels question that I that it was used in a PFA I'm not falling the chat very clearly so I'm not sure if I'm answering that question or not I didn't okay okay so we're running a little bit tight on time so we're gonna talk a little bit about some ethical considerations so one question was can you withhold information about your connection to a legal proceeding to obtain information from a defendant by for example creating a fake social media account and friending the opposing party or the opposing parties friends and the long and short of it is know that that is a misrepresentation and it violates the rules of professional conduct what we didn't put on there that you also can't have paralegal or some other person that you supervise do that for you right you know at your at your instructions that would still be you know you violating the rules of professional conduct and then I guess the caveat here or the I call it exception exactly but obviously if the information is publicly available then short you absolutely that's definitely fair game can you share evidence with the prosecutor in a related criminal matter and I believe the answer is yes as long as you have the clients informed consent this is actually one of my favorite things to do because there are lots of sort of benefits that can accrue to your client through the successful prosecution of a related criminal case you know obviously you can invoke you know the rule of collateral estoppel if somebody has been criminally convicted a simple assault or some other type of crime that obviously is going to satisfy the definition of abuse and a PFA case and so then you are more or less ensured to get a protection order for your client and of course convictions of certain kinds of crime are also going to be very useful in in a custody matter the 53:29 crimes commissions are those types of crimes so yeah just make sure that you are explaining carefully to your client what did what this means that you know explain the role of the prosecutor that the prosecutor is not your attorney they represent the state the Commonwealth not you so on so forth okay one under one minute we have just about one minute left and there was a question in the comment about electronic evidence during koban and what to do about that which i think is a whole other webinar and I also think that Larry and I are probably not the people to talk about that because Philadelphia is light years behind the rest of the counties and just like shut down and hasn't done anything but if anybody wants to send in some chat comments about tips and tricks they've been successful with during the pandemic I'm sure that would be really appreciated and this is Kelly while people are sending in any questions or comments they have I'm gonna launch the second of the CLE chat box questions please respond and I will leave it up for a minute thank you great well while you answer those questions that's all that we have prepared today thank you for attending if you have any questions please reach out to weary or I and Kelly will be distributing the materials absolutely yeah and happy Juneteenth tomorrow thank you so much for being with us of our lien Larry we really appreciate it thank you have a great day