If you’re getting spam calls or spam emails, you should bring recordings and printouts whenever possible. I printed out all my news articles about the Equifax breach for the judge’s review, as well as my Lifelock receipt to justify my damages. The best way to show up your opponent in small claims court is to be more prepared. The only thing left was to keep my fingers crossed. Several plaintiffs came after me, and at the end of the session, the judge announced that we should all go home and wait for our judgments to come in the mail. The ten minutes passed faster than I thought. “I’m not sure, Your Honor.” She looked frantically through her packet of talking points. The Equifax representative looked temporarily flustered. She looked at the Equifax representative, “Is it true that Equifax executives dumped their stock after internal news of the breach, but before it was announced to the public?” Bloomberg reported that three of the company’s senior executives sold nearly $1.8 million in shares after the company learned internally of the data breach, but before the announcement was made to the public. Equifax leaked my data, yada yada, but more importantly, they didn’t care. Because being interrogated by a judge is really freaking terrifying. I suddenly thought, this is why criminal defendants are allowed to plead the 5th. Haigh, you may approach the bench.” I stood up. The judge asked if he had any evidence that the spam calls were linked to Equifax. The Equifax representative piped up, and said, the plaintiff had not incurred any damages, but that if he was concerned, he should sign up for TrustID, Equifax’s free credit monitoring service. Ever since the Equifax breach, he had been getting spam calls from random numbers and locations he didn’t recognize. He was deaf, and had an interpreter with him. Pro tip: Always address the judge as “Your Honor.” That means it’s basically a lawyer that the Superior Court got to put on a nice black robe and act as a judge for the day to resolve the petty disputes of commoners.

Our judge that day would be Michelle McGill, a real estate lawyer in San Francisco who was acting as judge pro tem.

The Equifax lady looked at all the documents impassively. The clerk instructed us to exchange evidence with the Equifax representative, and I handed over the print-outs I had made the night before: of my screenshot saying I had been hacked, my Lifelock receipt, and the news articles on Equifax executives leaking our data, dumping their stock, and subsequently sharing links to phishing websites that lured consumers into (yet again), giving hackers their data. I knew she was probably a nice person, but as a corporate mouthpiece, she represented my adversary. She looked like a nice lady, with a neat packet and a red coat that she laid on the seat next to her. The Equifax representative was present as well, and she sat directly in front of me. (Just to clarify, if you receive funding from Legalist, you are contractually obligated to show up for trial, but that’s a separate matter). There were 12 of us packed into the hour, but 7 were no-shows, including several Equifax plaintiffs that Legalist had funded court costs for. I arrived at court at 8:30am for Trial Day. So basically, I was a little bit screwed. Sadly, these speculative damages are not normally looked well upon small claims court, which is more often used to recover exact amounts of unreturned security deposits and the like. Like many Americans, I’ll always have to look over my shoulder, check my credit score, and make sure new credit cards are not being opened in my name - all because of corporate greed and misconduct. Unfortunately, the heightened risk of identity theft is difficult to quantify in terms of damages. Not to mention that collecting, keeping, and selling our data is Equifax’s entire business. Six months before hackers attacked one of the company’s web portals and siphoned out data on a 145 million Americans, they were warned of a flaw that could have allowed exactly that seriousness of attack - and they ignored it. The easiest part to prove was liability and the willfulness of the breach. I told them under no circumstances were they allowed to come and watch or else I would physically be ill. My parents were visiting from England, and offered to come watch my trial.

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