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.

Part 13: The Advice of Opposing Counsel

In Part 5, I showed an excerpt of hidden video from my June 28, 2017 meeting with Andrew Hull.

At the time, the obvious point was the admission itself.

Valeo’s lead attorney acknowledged that the Compensation Agreement had never been signed, that there was no signed original, and that Valeo did not have signed copies.

That was significant enough.

But after Part 12, that same video should look different.

Part 12: The Illness Leverage

 

In Part 11, I detailed the black-letter reality of Indiana Trial Rule 9.2 and the deep disconnect between the courtroom record and the final written judgment. But a pro se, self-represented defendant does not simply wake up one morning with clear evidence of an opponent’s contract default. To uncover the fact that Valeo was litigating without a signed contract, I had to build a specific diagnostic mechanism.

And when I deployed it, the firm’s counsel responded by weaponizing a medical crisis.