Ina Fried

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You Know Who Really Loves Smartphones? Divorce Lawyers.

Lots of folks are finding that smartphones make their jobs easier.

You can add divorce lawyers to that group — but for a different reason.

Sure, like all sharks, divorce lawyers love their own mobile devices. But even more useful are those of their clients’ would-be ex-spouses.

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says that nearly all of its members have seen a sharp rise in the number of cases using evidence taken from iPhones, Androids and other smartphones. Text messages are also increasingly being used as evidence.

“As smartphones and text messaging become main sources of communication during the course of each day, there will inevitably be more and more evidence that an estranged spouse can collect,” organization President Ken Altshuler said in a statement. “Text messages can be particularly powerful forms of evidence during a divorce case, because they are written records of someone’s thoughts, actions and intentions.”

Text messages are the most common form of evidence presented, at 62 percent, followed by email at 23 percent. Phone numbers and call histories are used 13 percent of the time. Smartphone-specific data, such as GPS or Internet search history, is still rare in divorce cases, but represents the kind of powerful evidence bound to show up more in the future.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”