What are the Signs of Infidelity?

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION 

Most clients come in carrying proof to their early meetings with Kamilah Clark, an attorney withBelli, Weil, Grozbean and Davis, LLP, in Atlanta. Very often, her clients come in with copies of e-mails.“It’s amazing the amount of correspondence people send to each other over e-mail,” Clark said. “You would think people would be more discreet.”

The process usually starts at home. The client suspects wrongdoing, and does some digging. “You don’t usually go through someone’s e-mails unless you suspect something is going on,” Clark said.

Once they find something, the clients come to the law offices to find out what to do next.The clients’ suspicions and the preliminary proof set Clark on the trail. Finding more proof may be as easy as running searches on the Internet or asking the client to bring in cell phone documents. Sometimes it progresses to hiring a company to inspect hard drives. 

Clark said that most of the cases that come across her desk use some sort of electronic information-gathering. But even with her experience, she can still be surprised. For instance, she is amazed at the number of times she finds clients’ spouses with listings on online dating sites. “You would think that people would not put themselves on there when they are married,” Clark said, “but people do that all the time.”             

Client’s suspicions are also just the first step for Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, divorce attorney and managing partner of the family law practice group at Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen LLP in Philadelphia. She said people use electronic methods to investigate their partners for a reason. “You’re looking to see why they are lying to you,” Gold-Bikin said.  

One of her clients figured it out using the EZ Pass on the car, which is a device that automatically pays tolls as cars drive through a toll both. The client found that the bills from the EZ Pass transponder showed that the client’s husband was not where he said we would be. “You’ll see where he or she has been when they claim they are in a meeting in Philadelphia and they go across the bridge to see the girlfriend in New Jersey,” Gold-Bikin said.

However, Gold-Bikin explains, she doesn’t subpoena the transponder records. Instead, if the clients live in the same home and the bills arrive, they can take them. In another case, one of Gold-Bikin’s clients suspected his wife of having an affair, so he installed spyware on the computer. The program made copies of the e-mails after the wife sent the messages. That gave him proof that his wife was not only having an affair with his best friend, but they were posting invitations online for swinging couples to join them.

Gold-Bikin cautions about the use of spyware. Depending on the state, it may be illegal to use it, and it is not likely it can be used in court. But it will show what spouses are doing when they are using their computers. An answer more complicated than spyware on the electronic surveillance spectrum is inspecting or even cloning hard drives.

Mary Johanna McCurley, a Dallas family law attorney with McCurley, Orsinger, McCurley, Nelson & Downing, said this is becoming more common. “We’re actually going in and getting people’s hard drives,” said McCurley, who was also a past chair of the Family Law Section of the State Bar of Texas. “So even if they have deleted e-mails, they can pull them up, if they know what they are doing.”

She said this cottage industry is becoming a useful part of finding information. There are several reasons a client might want information about a spouse’s hard drive, but she said one reason crops up commonly. “The biggest one is if they are, or at least having the appearance of, having a relationship with somebody else,” McCurley said.

McCurley said she expects the next advent in electronic information gathering to be some way to save text messages. She said clients can get a small amount of information from cell phone bills, such as who is calling whom when, but until text messages can be salvaged or saved and accessed, there is much more to be found.