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It’s much easier to get caught cheating on your spouse these days, thanks to e-mail.

Electronic communication, as it’s done with nearly every other facet of modern life, has pervaded the practice of philandering and figures largely in alimony, jockeying for custody and other issues that are the domain of the family law attorney.

E-mails, cell phone logs and even Web site visits give divorce lawyers many more avenues of proof of spousal misdeed than in the old days, while judges have to rely less on the appearance of credibility to decide who’s fibbing and who’s not.

Vince Saffiotti, an attorney with Downs & Saffiotti, a firm that focuses exclusively on family law, says it’s the rare case these days that doesn’t see e-mails come into play—either as evidence of spousal misbehavior or, on a more positive note, as a tool for helping estranged parents work together.

Adultery is one of three legal grounds for divorce provided for in Louisiana law, and proving it has never been easier, Saffiotti says. Before e-mail, it tended to be one spouse’s word against the other—except in the case of recorded conversations. E-mail changes all that.

“In the past you would never have had that kind of communication going back and forth between a spouse and a paramour,” Saffiotti says. “You can print it right off the computer and see when they’re meeting, what they’re doing, how they feel about each other—because people express all those feelings in e-mails.”

Even if e-mail isn’t always enough to prove adultery, it can indicate that something was going on—which can help the cause of a spouse seeking “permanent spousal support,” or permanent alimony, from the other party. If Spouse 1 is shown to be implicated in the breakup, Spouse 2 is more likely to win alimony, unless Spouse 2 is also implicated.

That’s why proving who did what when becomes so important, and why it’s become the norm for electronic communications to be used as evidence in divorce cases. People tend to be honest and to the point in e-mails, Saffiotti says, which helps since it gives a truer picture of what’s going on between spouses. Threats, harassment, craziness—it’s all there in black and white. As such, e-mail can indicate a parent’s fitness when it comes to awarding custody of the kids.

Custody can even be taken away and given to the other parent based on what winds up on the Internet. Say a teenager brags on his MySpace page about getting drunk, doing drugs or having sex at dad’s house and the other parent finds it. All of a sudden, that parent is in strong position to argue for a change of custody. Saffiotti says he’s amazed by the stuff children—even parents—put on their MySpace pages.

In a recent case, Saffiotti dealt with a mother who’d been awarded custody but had a problem with pain medication. One day, the mother passed out and couldn’t be roused. The child took a photo with a cell phone and e-mailed it to dad.

“I would have never in the past had that kind of evidence,” Saffiotti says. “Here we have a child sending proof via cell phone that the mother is passed out on her medications.”

The computer can also offer clues in cases when a parent awarded custody is visiting pornography—even child pornography—Web sites. Sometimes spouses, if they suspect wrongdoing on by the other party, simply take the family computer with them when they walk out. Otherwise, hard drives can be subpoenaed, and it’s very difficult to erase all traces of Web sites visited even if a spouse tries.

Louisiana law was amended this year to address the subjects of electronic media and making people produce it during litigation. Prior to the amendment, there was nothing stipulating that a person could legally be compelled to turn over electronic evidence. Now there is.

“I think the right was always there,” Saffiotti says. “I think they just wanted to be a little more particular about electronic stored information. You want to see a copy of somebody’s hard drive? You can ask for that to be produced in a custody proceeding.”

Other issues are still being chewed on by federal and state courts, however. Jim Raines, who practices family law with Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, says the question remain unsettled over when electronic communications—e-mails, in this case—are admissible and when they’re not. The main question revolves around how the e-mail was acquired and who was involved in the communication.

If it’s between one spouse and the other, no problem. But if it’s an e-mail between a spouse and a “third party,” an attorney may run up against the Electronic Surveillance Act. The way the ESA was written allows you to record conversations you’re part of, but not those between your spouse and a third party.

Is it legal to intercept an in-transit email between a spouse and a third party? The ESA would appear to say no, though Louisiana state courts have yet to grapple with the issue and come up with an answer one way or another, Raines says.

“I think a lawyer has to be careful using electronic communication, because we don’t know how Louisiana’s going to treat it,” he says. “There’s potential civil and criminal penalties that your client can incur.”

On the other hand, if the e-mail has been sent and is stored on the family computer, the general consensus is that the law will allow that, Raines says.

“What the ESA is really dealing with is the interception of a communication,” he says. “Are you intercepting an e-mail going or coming? That’s what the law is looking at.”

Where it gets tricky is when a suspicious spouse installs “spy ware” software on the family computer. This kind of software records key strokes of the user and takes regular “snapshots” of e-mails and Web sites visited. If a court decides that spy ware is effectively intercepting e-mails in transit, rather than retrieving them from storage, then it could expose clients to penalties. Deciding the question ultimately will, no doubt, entail the fine art of legal hair-splitting.

Raines says figuring out how to handle electronic media as evidence is “cutting-edge law” these days. It’s so cutting edge that law curriculums haven’t gotten around to addressing it, at least not at LSU.

“The short answer is we haven’t seen it trickle into law school curriculum very much,” says John Church, who teaches Internet law and intellectual property and electronic discovery at the LSU law center. “We talk about rules in discovery. I don’t think that we’re talking too much about the actual use as evidence.”

That’s likely to change, he says, noting that his Internet law class has only been taught for three years. Sometimes it takes time for curriculum to catch up with what’s happening in the legal field.

“I think that it’s almost inevitable now that these things are starting to be used more,” he says. “In the corporate context, we’re seeing a number of cases where instant messaging or e-mails are used to establish patterns of behavior.”