Part 17 — When the Court Became Part of the Story

In the last status update, I explained why this is no longer just an old lawsuit.

The same judgment I have been writing about is now being enforced against my family’s daily life.

My daughter’s vehicle.

My wife’s property interests.

My tools.

My ability to work.

So now I need to move faster through the record.

Not recklessly.

But faster.

Because at a certain point, this stopped being only a story about Valeo.

It stopped being only a story about Valeo’s lawyers.

It became a story about what the court allowed.

This is that point.

Status Update — Now It Reaches My Daughter’s Car

I need to pause the numbered series for a current update.

This is not just history anymore.

The same judgment I have been writing about is now being enforced against my family’s daily life.

And once again, one of my children is being pulled into a lawsuit that was never against them.

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First Ethan. Now Emily.

Earlier, I wrote about my son Ethan’s bank account.

That account included money he earned from his summer job at UPS and money intended for college.

It was frozen anyway.

Now the court has entered an order and writ that lists my daughter Emily’s Toyota 4Runner as property to be seized.

Emily is not a defendant.

She is not part of this lawsuit.

She uses the 4Runner in Colorado to get to and from work.

She has made the payments.

I am connected to the title because she needed a co-signer to qualify for financing.

There is still a sizeable loan on it. I’m unsure of the balance because I do not have a login or make payments. Emily does.

It is not sitting in my driveway.

It is not hidden.

It is my daughter’s transportation.

And it is now listed in a sheriff’s writ.

Part 16: The Boxes

In Part 15, I showed the metadata from the 2010 Employment Agreement and the 2010 Compensation Agreement.

Both PDFs were generated from the same Word document.

Both were created on April 28, 2017.

Valeo filed its Motion for Summary Judgment three days later.

That made the missing Compensation Agreement problem worse, not better.

Because Valeo was not simply missing a piece of paper.

Valeo was asking the court to enforce a written agreement while the document defining my compensation had not been produced in signed form.

That raised the obvious question:

How did the case keep moving?

The answer is that the case was put into boxes.

Part 15: The Same Word Document

In Part 14, I explained why metadata matters.

A PDF is not just a picture of a document.

Sometimes it is a scan.

Sometimes it is a court-stamped filing.

Sometimes it is exported from Word.

Sometimes it carries the name of the Word document it came from.

And sometimes that matters more than the words on the page.

This is one of those times.

Part 14: The Digital Fingerprints

At the end of Part 13, I said the story was about to move from paper to pixels.

That is where everything changed.

For most of the litigation, I was operating inside the paper version of the case.

Mailed filings.

Scanned copies.

Court-stamped pages.

Low-quality images.

 

Paper exhibits.

Documents that looked official because they had been filed in court.

That was the world I could see at the time.

But years later, when I was finally able to obtain and inspect more of the actual electronic court files, I began looking at the record differently.

Not just at what the documents said.

At what the files were.

That is when I started looking at metadata.

Metadata is not complicated.

It is the information stored inside or attached to an electronic file.

A PDF may show one thing on the page, but the file can also contain information about when it was created, when it was modified, what software generated it, who authored it, what source document it came from, and sometimes the system or organization connected to the file.

In other words, metadata can be a digital fingerprint.