Tracer is the tracing system I built for California family law matters. It reads the bank and brokerage statements, follows every dollar across every account, and produces schedules that tie to the statements line by line.
Discuss a Tracing Matter How It Works| Date | Description | Community | Husband | Flag |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1 | Opening balance | 60,000.00 | 40,000.00 | |
| Mar 1 | To husband's account | 0.00 | (25,000.00) | TRF C/H |
| Mar 2 | To joint savings | (24,000.00) | (6,000.00) | TRF C/H |
| Mar 3 | From husband's account | 5,000.00 | 5,000.00 | PAIR C/H |
| Mar 4 | Card payment | (3,000.00) | 0.00 | |
| Mar 31 | Closing balance | 38,000.00 | 14,000.00 |
A separate property claim is only as strong as the trace behind it. Years of statements, money moving between joint and separate accounts, and an opposing expert reading every line for a gap. A spreadsheet built by hand is slow to prepare and hard to check, and one unexplained line can cost the whole schedule its credibility.
Bank, card and brokerage statements are read in full, and each statement's opening and closing balances are checked against its transactions.
Every transaction is classified as community or separate and by type. Automated rules make the first pass; I review and decide each line.
Running balances for the community and each spouse's separate estate, in every account, with transfers followed from one account to the next.
A written report with schedules, exhibits and a methodology section that names every rule applied, ready for your review.
Each account's schedule opens and closes on the balances printed on the bank statements. A schedule that does not tie says so on its face.
The low intermediate balance setting, the order in which funds are drawn, and how transfers between accounts are allocated are named in the report, so the method can be checked rather than inferred.
Where money did not follow its coding, the line carries a flag saying why, drawn from a published index of 36 exception types.
A transfer carries its community and separate components into the receiving account, so separate funds are traced through intermediate accounts instead of being lost at the account boundary.
Each classification decision is recorded in a tamper-evident audit log, so the path from the statements to the schedule can be shown.
The analysis shows what the records establish. It does not assume a transmutation, and it does not label spending as waste or dissipation.
Applied as the facts and your theory of the case require.
Financial records in a dissolution are among the most sensitive documents a client has. Here is exactly how Tracer handles them.
Tracer runs on my own workstation. Case data is stored locally, not in a cloud service, and is not shared with any other party.
One step uses an outside service: PDF statements are sent to Google's Vertex AI to read the text from each page.
Statements provided as bank data exports are processed entirely on my workstation.
We can agree on handling at engagement, including any protective order terms.
The initial call is free. Bring the list of accounts and the dates of marriage and separation, and I'll tell you what the trace will need.
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