Quickly prepare financial data for court

My name is Todd Tracy. I am an attorney. I have my own law firm, the Tracy Law Group, here in Seattle.

Our firm is a bankruptcy law firm. We do a combination of commercial bankruptcy, receivership work, and a lot of work with individuals who are in financial distress.

In a bankruptcy case, when I put bankruptcy schedules, which are a requirement of the case, together, those are being signed by the client under penalty of perjury that they're true and accurate. I am signing them, which brings my own ethical obligations to say that I've investigated that data. So, in my firm, I always require backup. I want to see bank statements. I want to see invoices.

I want to see, if it's QuickBooks, a QuickBooks data copy, or whatever I can get. I usually scare clients because I want so much backup, whether that's in electronic form or in paper form, but it gives me the confidence that I don't have to come back at a later time and try to find something that they don't have, or if they don't have it, I'm prepared to deal with that going into the case.

Trying to actually find out if the data is real is a big challenge for us.

It was very groundbreaking for us to work with Valid8. I had never seen anything like this that could take a set of basically non-existent financial books and create for me and for my client and for the court readable, understandable, traceable, trackable information that with a few clicks on the filters and sorting we could see exactly where things had gone, where things had been missed, where outflows of cash had been that we did not know about.

It was a visual presentation that, for me, was very eye-opening. For the client, it was very eye-opening, and I think for the creditors, it was very helpful. I do think Valid 8 changes considerably that audit and that forensic process in a bankruptcy case.

I don't even think you need to have it necessarily as a forensic and auditing tool. I think when you have a client who's not kept their books up to date, even coming in and just doing an initial run so that we've got everybody working on the same page is extraordinarily helpful.

Knowing that I can use this service and get the results and the information and the data that I need is a great comfort.