How much does it cost to subpoena phone records?

The out-of-pocket numbers.

Carriers charge processing fees set by their legal compliance departments - commonly $25 to $150 for basic subscriber information and call detail records, more for tower data or stored content. Add process-server fees ($50-$150), witness fees where testimony is required, and certification costs. A straightforward records pull in a criminal case usually lands under a few hundred dollars in hard costs.

Who can actually subpoena them.

This is where the internet answers go wrong. Private citizens cannot subpoena anything - subpoenas issue through courts, from parties to actual proceedings. In a criminal case, the defense obtains records through Rule 17 subpoenas with court authorization. Content - the texts themselves, voicemail, email bodies - generally cannot be had by subpoena at all: the Stored Communications Act reserves content for search warrants, which only the government can obtain.

Practical translation: call detail records, dates, durations, and subscriber data are gettable. What was said usually is not, unless it lives on a phone you lawfully possess.

The costs nobody quotes.

Records without a custodian certification are hearsay; records demanded too broadly draw motions to quash; and records that contradict your own client’s account are discoverable by the other side once used. The expensive part of phone records is the lawyering around them - which records, from which carrier, authenticated how, deployed when. Cheap evidence used badly costs cases.

How the defense uses them.

Tower data has broken more than one government timeline; call records have unmade more than one cooperating witness. When this firm builds a federal defense, phone records come in early, certified, and quietly - before the government knows which minutes matter.

THE AUTHOR

Todd A. Spodek

Managing partner. Second-generation federal defense lawyer - the Netflix defense, the Fox and CNN analyst chair, and two decades of federal courtrooms.

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