In Part 8, I shared the “Inside Story” of Valeo’s 2009 internal management records—the financial desperation and the premeditated decision to institute wage fines to “save” the firm. For Valeo, this model was more than just a policy; it was a survival strategy. But in early 2015, as I prepared to leave, evidence shows that Valeo believed that their strategy was illegal and the firm was now facing another existential threat. Instead of coming clean, it appears that they doubled down.
The firm didn’t just need a “billion-dollar litigator.” They needed a legislative shield to protect their house of cards from a mass exodus.
The Real Threat: Deterrence
In 2015, Valeo’s greatest concern likely wasn’t my small $33,627.75 claim over “sub-target” clients; it was the other advisors.
Unlike me, likely all of the younger advisors had signed the Compensation Agreement that included the wage fine provisions. If those advisors believed their agreements were legally unenforceable because they contained illegal wage violations, they might try to leave and take their clients with them, jeopardizing Valeo’s survival.
It appears that Valeo decided to make an example out of me. By hiring the most aggressive attorney in the state to pursue a decade-long war, the message was clear to every other employee: “This is what will happen to you if you try to leave.”
If they could destroy my national professional reputation and established practice not even in Indy, the message would be clear to everyone else.
Statistically Significant: The Legislative Shield
To pull this off, Valeo had to mitigate the risk of their own illegal model being exposed during the litigation. Under Indiana wage laws at the time, if an employee sued to recover illegal wage fines, the burden was on the employer to pay the employee’s legal fees. This gave advisors immense leverage to nullify their contracts at Valeo’s expense.
The timeline of what happened next is, statistically impossible to be a coincidence:
January 14, 2015: Indiana House Bill 1469 introduced
January 15, 2015: Valeo sends Aaron first demand letter
May 5, 2015: Governor Mike Pence signs House Bill 1469 into law
May 8, 2015: Valeo files its lawsuit
Indiana House Bill 1469, now law,
Reduced the employer penalty for wage fines from 3 times the amount down to 2 times the amount withheld, and
Eliminated the requirement for employers to pay legal expenses for employees seeking to recover wage fines.
That’s statistically significant, but not statistically impossible.
Statistically Impossible: The Invoice for the “Crime”
The most telling detail isn’t just the dates of the law—it’s what was happening inside Andrew Hull’s law firm on the day the shield was forged.
On May 5, 2015—the exact same day the Governor signed the law to protect employers from wage-fine penalties—billing records show that Hull’s associate was specifically researching the “Indiana wage-payment statute arising from commission setoff”.
Valeo’s complaint against me made no mention of wage fines. They sued for breach of contract. Why would they research their own liability for wage fines on the very day the law changed—unless they were preparing to hide a crime?
This was likely not an accidental admission. Probably cover. But if they created it in 2017, they may have failed to remember the significance of the dates two years earlier.
Knowing that I had evidence of Valeo’s wage fines, even though I was prohibited from producing evidence to the Court, they were keeping an escape hatch to claim Performance Standards Adjustments were not illegal wage fines, but simply commissions not earned.
Investment advisors at Valeo are not licensed to earn commissions, and Valeo is not a broker/dealer who can pay commissions.
What Were They Defending?
In my Answer, I did not raise any counterclaims. That means I was not returning fire against Valeo. I did not believe there was any reason to. I missed the significance of Hull. The significance of the law change dates were not clear until I noticed the dates on Hull’s invoices long after the judgment and appeal were over.
Hull’s office, when reviewing my Answer, believed that they needed to do further research on Wage Payment Statute defenses. That is even more extraordinary now with the added knowledge that related parties were somehow involved in rewriting the actual law.
What research is necessary when:
You were almost certainly involved in the amended law?
There is nothing in the lawsuit for you to defend, because the Defendant didn’t raise any counterclaims?
Was all this really ever about Aaron and $33,627.75 over six sub-target clients?
The Proximity of Power
The author of HB 1469 was Representative David Ober. Following the dismissal of my federal lawsuit, Ober resigned before the end of his term to take a position on the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) where he has gained quite a reputation.
While Andrew Hull’s wife, Cami Swanson-Hull, had retired from that same commission in 2002, she remained a highly recognized figure in that circle of Indiana regulatory power. At the same time the law changed, Andrew Hull was concurrently handling the $1.3 billion IBM v. Indiana case—the highest-claim litigation in state history.
The IBM cases happened to have the same trial judge as ours. Well not at first. But after Hull’s change of judge request, we were randomly assigned to the same judge. Ten civil courts in Marion County and we were randomly selected to the very same judge that was hearing most of Hull’s trials at the time.
While I cannot say for certain how these connections influenced the law, the “statistical impossibility” of an elite litigator, deeply embedded in state power, representing a client who perfectly benefited from a last-minute legislative shield cannot be ignored.
The Extra Risk
Valeo’s legal team has likely had significant reason to be apprehensive over the last eleven years. If the firm knowingly engaged in a crime, and their counsel—fully aware of the situation as evidenced by their own invoices—utilized their expertise to advance that misconduct, they have moved beyond the role of counselor to that of an accessory. In legal terms, they become an accessory after the fact. A standard illustration involves a murder trial: if a client reveals the location of a hidden weapon to their attorney, that knowledge is protected. However, if that attorney then advises the client to further conceal the evidence, or takes it upon themselves to hide it, they are no longer practicing law; they are participating in the crime.
What makes this scenario critical is that once that ethical boundary is breached, the shield of attorney-client privilege evaporates. If Hull and others assisted Valeo in what appears to be a premeditated wage-fine crime, they would be personally liable and unable to withhold evidence from authorities—especially regarding their potential involvement in lobbying for the legislative changes of 2015. Consequently, Hull’s firm likely had an even greater motivation than Valeo to double down on their strategy and ensure these actions remained buried.
And for eleven years, it has worked.
The Ultimate Irony
Valeo hired the man whose client list included the NFL and Netflix to manage the existential risk of their entire compensation model and firm.
Because the court ruled that the incomplete “Entire Agreement” provision for fees held, I was eventually ordered to pay for Andrew Hull’s fees—including the time his firm spent researching how to hide what appears to be Valeo’s own premeditated wage-fine crime.
By my estimate, over $157,000 of the current claimed judgment is exclusively from Valeo’s legal fees that the “Court” ordered me to pay, including the wage fine research. Court is in quotes because in a later post, we will look at who wrote the orders.
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In Part 10, we will look at the “Triple Filing” of September 2016—the moment when a single envelope and a “lost” affidavit were used to trigger the discovery sanctions that effectively blindfolded my defense and kept this “Inside Story” from ever reaching the court.
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