Can a Thumbs Up Emoji Sign a Contract? What Courts Decided

A Saskatchewan farmer sent a thumbs up in reply to a photo of a contract. A court decided that counted as a signature, and ordered him to pay 82,200 Canadian dollars. He appealed, and lost.

That case is the one people quote, but it is not an isolated oddity. Emoji turn up in court constantly now, as signatures, as threats, as proof that a screenshot was faked. Here is what judges have actually decided, and where they disagree with each other.

The flax contract that cost a farmer 82,200 dollars

In 2021 a grain buyer named Kent Mickleborough wanted flax. He drew up a contract, signed the paper copy, photographed it and texted the image to farmer Chris Achter with the words "Please confirm flax contract". Achter replied with a single thumbs up.

The two had done business for years, and the pattern of that business is what decided the case. Earlier contracts had been agreed the same way, with the buyer texting a photograph and the farmer replying with a word or two. The court had a record of those exchanges to compare against.

No flax was delivered. The buyer sued, arguing the reply was acceptance. The farmer argued it meant only that he had received the photo. The Saskatchewan court sided with the buyer and awarded damages of 82,200 Canadian dollars.

An Israeli court got there first

Six years before the flax case, a small claims court in Herzliya heard a dispute between a landlord and a couple who never moved in. The prospective tenants had replied to the apartment listing with a message carrying a string of upbeat emoji, including a champagne bottle, a squirrel and a comet.

The landlord read that as a deal, took the listing down and lost other applicants. The couple then stopped answering. The court found the message conveyed optimism strong enough to mislead, and awarded the landlord damages for the lost rental period.

Nobody signed anything. The emoji were not treated as a contract, they were treated as conduct that created a reasonable expectation. That is a narrower finding than the Canadian one, and it is the earliest widely reported example of a court pricing emoji.

What the judge actually wrote

The reasoning is worth reading because the judge did not pretend this was ordinary. He wrote that the court "readily acknowledges that a 'thumbs up' emoji is a non traditional means to 'sign' a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a 'signature'."

Those two purposes are identifying the signer and showing they accept the terms. The judge found the emoji did both, partly because the two men had a history of agreeing deals by short text replies like "yup" and "ok". Context carried the decision, not the glyph.

The appeal failed in December 2024

Achter appealed. On 16 December 2024 a majority of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal refused to overturn the finding. That matters more than the original ruling, because an appellate court reviewing the reasoning and letting it stand gives the decision real weight for future cases.

It is worth being clear about what the ruling does not say. It does not hold that a thumbs up means yes everywhere, and it does not create a rule that applies to a stranger texting you out of the blue. It holds that between these two men, with this history, on this document, the reply was acceptance.

A different court reached the opposite answer

Here is the part that gets left out of the headlines. The British Columbia Supreme Court looked at a thumbs up in a real estate transaction and found it did not create a binding agreement.

Both courts applied the same basic test, which is what a reasonable person would understand from the exchange. They reached opposite conclusions because the surrounding facts differed. So there is no rule that 👍 means yes. There is a rule that your whole conversation gets read, and the emoji is one word in it.

One practical consequence is that the two rulings together are more useful than either alone. A lawyer can now point to a Canadian appellate court holding that a thumbs up bound a seller, and to another Canadian court holding that it did not bind a buyer. Read side by side they are a strong argument that the glyph settles nothing by itself.

Emoji in court are not rare any more

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara, has been counting reported cases that reference emoji or emoticons since 2004. He found exactly one that first year. By 2017 it was 33. In 2018 it was 53, and by 2019 the count was heading past 100.

Goldman has also made the point that courts rarely reproduce the emoji in their written opinions. Many describe it in words instead, or omit it, which means the appellate record can be missing the very thing in dispute. A judge reading the file later may never see what the jury saw.

The pattern is what you would expect from evidence that follows how people actually talk. As more of the record of a dispute consists of text messages, more of it contains emoji, and judges have no established guidelines for reading them.

When an emoji proved a text message was fake

The most useful case for ordinary readers is not about meaning at all. In Rossbach v. Montefiore Medical Center, an employee suing for harassment produced screenshots of text messages supporting her claim.

The defence examined the images and challenged their authenticity, and one of the problems was an emoji. The particular design shown in the screenshot did not match what the phone she claimed to have used would have displayed. Emoji artwork changes between operating system versions, and that left a timestamp she had not thought about. The court found the messages unreliable.

Emoji as evidence in criminal cases

Prosecutors use them too. In a Massachusetts murder case, the prosecution argued that a defendant's use of an emoji with crosses for eyes, next to the victim's nickname, supported premeditation. The glyph was not the whole case, but it was part of the record put to the jury.

Defence lawyers have had success pushing back on this. The argument is that an emoji carries no fixed meaning, so attributing intent to one is speculation dressed as evidence. Courts have gone both ways, and the outcome often turns on whether the sender used the symbol repeatedly or just once.

This is where the lack of a shared dictionary becomes a real problem. A skull means death to one reader and means something was extremely funny to another, and which reading a jury applies can depend on their age more than the evidence.

Harassment claims, and where courts drew the line

Workplace cases are the most common category after criminal ones. Courts have seen heart emoji, tongue emoji and kissing emoji offered as proof of a hostile environment, and in several instances found the conduct did not reach the legal standard of severe or pervasive.

That is not a licence to send them. It means the emoji rarely carries the claim on its own, the same way a single off remark rarely does. Volume and pattern are what moves a case.

Emoji in employment and termination disputes

Dismissal cases are where most people will actually encounter this. Message history is now the default record of how a team spoke to each other, and that record is full of reactions rather than sentences.

The difficulty for a tribunal is that a reaction is deliberately ambiguous. A laughing face on a colleague's message can be warmth, mockery or discomfort, and the sender rarely has to commit to which. Investigators end up reconstructing meaning from the thread around it, which is slow and unreliable.

If you manage people, the useful habit is to avoid settling anything consequential with a reaction. Approve a leave request in words. Decline a proposal in words. The reaction is fine for acknowledgement and poor for decisions.

Why the same emoji can mean different things to two courts

Part of the difficulty is technical rather than legal. The same code point is drawn differently by Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, so the sender and the receiver can be looking at genuinely different pictures.

We cover the mechanics in our guide to vendor rendering, and you can compare the vendor artwork yourself on our Apple and Android pages. The OK hand is the obvious cautionary example, having picked up meanings its designers never intended.

What lawyers now tell clients

The advice has converged on a few points, none of them complicated.

• Do not use an emoji to accept, approve or confirm anything with money attached.
• Assume every message you send is readable in court, including reactions you later remove.
• If you receive an ambiguous emoji on something important, ask for confirmation in words rather than relying on it.
• Preserve screenshots with their original metadata, because the artwork itself can be checked against the device.
• Remember that the recipient may be seeing a different drawing of the same character.

The last point does real work. Contract disputes turn on what a reasonable person would understand, and reasonable people on different phones are not always looking at the same picture.

What this means for how you use a thumbs up

The practical takeaway is narrow and worth getting right. If someone sends you a document and asks you to confirm, a thumbs up can be treated as confirmation. If you mean "received, I will look at it", type that instead. It costs you four seconds.

The same applies in reverse. If you are the one asking, a thumbs up is weaker evidence than a sentence, and you should not build a deal on it. A handshake emoji is no better.

For the broader etiquette of which emoji land badly at work, see our guide to emoji in business communication and the emoji etiquette guide. If you want the meanings themselves, emoji meanings and our hand emoji guide cover the gestures that cause the most trouble, and what emoji mean from a guy covers the ones people misread socially.

The short version

No court has ruled that an emoji always means one thing. Two courts in the same country reached opposite answers on the same glyph within a couple of years. What they agree on is that emoji are part of the record, read in context, like any other thing you wrote.

None of this should make you anxious about sending a smiley to a friend. The cases that reach a courtroom involve money, employment or a criminal charge, and in every one of them the emoji sat inside a conversation that was already contentious.

Treat the ones you send in a negotiation the way you would treat a sentence, because that is how they will be read back to you. A crossed fingers or a pleading face in a thread about money is evidence now, and the heart emoji you fire off without thinking is too.