Deep Dive – Elizabeth Anne Tener
Family Law Lawyer, Greenspoon Marder LLP — Orlando & Winter Park, Florida
High Net-Worth Divorce and Custody Litigation

In this episode we take a detailed look at Elizabeth Anne Tener, a Florida family law attorney and partner at Greenspoon Marder LLP, one of the larger national law firms headquartered in Florida. The focus is not a particular case but rather a professional profile: who she is, how her career developed, and how attorneys in high-asset divorce and custody litigation operate within the legal system.

The discussion is based entirely on publicly available records, including law firm biographies, Florida Bar licensing information, professional publications, and legal organization memberships. The purpose of the episode is to understand the structure of a legal career in family law and how lawyers working in complex divorce cases build experience and professional reputation.

This episode also briefly explains the research methodology, which relies on open-source research techniques sometimes referred to as OSINT (open-source intelligence). No confidential documents, private communications, or non-public databases were used.

Elizabeth Anne Tener is a marital and family law attorney based in Central Florida. She is a partner in the Marital & Family Law practice group at Greenspoon Marder LLP, working primarily in the Orlando and Winter Park legal markets.

Her practice focuses on complex family law matters, including:

• high-net-worth divorce
• contested child custody disputes
• alimony and child support litigation
• valuation and division of marital assets
• prenuptial and postnuptial agreements
• relocation and parenting plan disputes
• enforcement and modification of court orders
• paternity and adoption matters
• domestic violence injunction proceedings

Many of these cases involve complicated financial structures such as businesses, investments, real estate holdings, and retirement assets.

Elizabeth Tener’s academic background includes:

Centenary College of Louisiana
Bachelor of Arts — Professional Writing
Minor — Business Administration
Graduated: 2001

A background in professional writing can be particularly relevant to legal practice, as litigation often involves drafting motions, pleadings, and persuasive legal arguments.

She later attended:

University of Miami School of Law

Juris Doctor — 2003

While in law school she participated in the Steel Hector & Davis Fellowship through the Center for Ethics and Public Service, a program focused on public interest law and professional ethics.

After graduating from law school, Tener began her legal career in public service.

She worked as an Assistant State Attorney in Florida’s Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, located in Palm Beach County.

In this role she served as a felony prosecutor in West Palm Beach, handling criminal cases on behalf of the State of Florida.

Public biographies state that she participated in more than fifty jury trials during this time. Prosecutorial work often provides extensive courtroom experience early in a lawyer’s career.

Many litigators later transition from prosecution into civil practice areas where trial experience is valuable.

After leaving the State Attorney’s Office, Tener moved into private practice and began focusing on marital and family law.

She worked with The Law Firm of Charles D. Jamieson, a boutique family law firm in South Florida.

Family law practice involves a wide range of issues related to marriage dissolution and family disputes, including property division, custody

Episode OverviewWho is Elizabeth Anne Tener?EducationEarly Career – ProsecutorTransition to Family Law

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The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects core freedoms from government interference. Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."constitution.congress+1

It safeguards five main freedoms, often summarized as the "five freedoms."

• Religion: Prevents laws establishing a national religion (Establishment Clause) or banning its free exercise (Free Exercise Clause).wikipedia+1

• Speech: Shields spoken, written, symbolic, and expressive communication from censorship, though limits exist for incitement or threats.freedomofexpression.osu+1

• Press: Protects publishing and media from prior restraint or government control.[en.wikipedia]​

• Assembly: Guarantees peaceful gatherings and protests.[acluaz]​

• Petition: Allows citizens to seek government redress for grievances.[law.cornell]​

Originally limiting only federal Congress, its protections extended to states via the 14th Amendment starting in 1925 (Gitlow v. New York). Supreme Court cases like New York Times Co. v. United States (1971) reinforced broad speech and press rights against censorship.[en.wikipedia]​

It applies to government actions, not private entities, and covers diverse expression like art or association. Recent rulings, such as Janus v. AFSCME (2018), bar compelled speech like mandatory union fees.acluaz+1

Key ProtectionsHistorical ContextModern Scope

I grew up with a pretty simple operating system: I’m allergic to very little, but one thing I cannot tolerate is bullshit. That allergy didn’t develop in a classroom or a boardroom. It developed in Florida. Real Florida. The counties where land determines everything, where last names echo through courthouse hallways, and where everyone knows exactly which families have been pulling the strings for the last hundred years even if nobody says it out loud.

People say I have a chip on my shoulder about authority. Maybe I do. But if you grow up in places where power structures are inherited like farmland, that chip isn’t a personality flaw. It’s pattern recognition.

Florida runs on land.

Not tourism. Not beaches. Not retirement communities. Land. Who owned it first, who sold it, who developed it, and which law firms made the deals. If you trace the history of almost any county in this state, you’ll eventually hit the same intersection: land, money, politics, and lawyers.

Volusia County is one of those places where that intersection has been operating for more than a century.

The city of DeLand itself was founded in the 1870s by Henry DeLand, a northern industrialist who imagined the place as what he called the “Athens of Florida.” That vision brought institutions. Stetson University followed soon after. Citrus wealth flowed through the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Railroads connected the interior to the coast. And slowly, over decades, a small network of families and institutions began shaping the county’s civic life.

At the center of that ecosystem sits one of the oldest continuously operating law firms in Florida: Landis Graham French.

The firm was born in 1902 when Cary D. Landis and Bert Fish formed Landis & Fish in downtown DeLand. Over the next hundred years the firm produced state attorneys, judges, ambassadors, legislators, and legal scholars. Cary Landis himself became Florida’s Attorney General. Bert Fish would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Portugal and previously as America’s first minister to Saudi Arabia during the Roosevelt administration. Members of the firm were deeply involved in drafting legal frameworks that shaped Florida governance, including early foundations of what would eventually become the Florida Highway Patrol.

Over time the firm represented estates tied to some of the most influential figures connected to the region and the state. Stetson University. The estate of Adolph DeBary, namesake of the city of DeBary. Even the Florida estate of John D. Rockefeller.

For more than a century the firm evolved through mergers, new partners, and new political connections. Generations of lawyers joined, many with family ties that stretched through local government, the courts, and civic institutions. Partners served as presidents of the Volusia County Bar Association. Others became judges, state representatives, or key advisors inside county government.

In other words, this isn’t just a law firm. It’s an institutional pillar of the region.

And sometime along the way, the Ford family became part of that lineage.

Frank A. Ford Sr. joined the firm during a merger in 1969 that reshaped the partnership structure. He was instrumental in founding the Oil & Gas Law Section of the Florida Bar. Years later his son, F.A. “Alex” Ford Jr., joined the firm in 1983.

That’s where Alex Ford enters this story.

Now let me say something clearly before anyone misinterprets what I’m saying: I don’t hate Alex Ford. I don’t wake up thinking about Alex Ford. In fact, during one exchange he told me directly that he isn’t my adversary. Those are the facts.

But stories about power aren’t about personal hatred. They’re about context.

Alex Ford is a lifelong resident of DeLand. His legal practice focuses on eminent domain, land transactions, and development. That alone tells you something important, because in Florida those fields sit directly on top of the most valuable asset in the state: land.

Every once in a while you meet someone who represents the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from you, and instead of the conversation collapsing into slogans and caricatures, something more interesting happens. The tribal shorthand dissolves. You’re no longer talking to the cardboard cutout version of a political enemy that people perform for their own side. You’re talking to a person who clearly knows what they’re doing. That distinction matters more than people want to admit.

Recently I had a conversation with Brad Parscale, the digital strategist who helped architect the online machine behind the 2016 election of Donald Trump. On paper, you could not design two people who should agree less politically. I’m about as liberal as they come. He built the digital infrastructure that powered one of the most controversial political victories in modern American history. In the current environment, that combination is supposed to produce hostility on sight.

But reality is more complicated than that.

There’s a difference between someone you disagree with and someone you dismiss. The modern internet has trained people to collapse those two categories into one. If someone sits on the opposite side of a political divide, they must also be stupid, malicious, or unserious. That assumption is convenient, emotionally satisfying, and completely wrong far more often than people realize.

Brad Parscale is not stupid.

You don’t build a digital system capable of moving tens of millions of voters by accident. You don’t orchestrate one of the most sophisticated political advertising operations in American history by stumbling into it. Whether someone loves the result or hates it, the architecture behind it was real.

The reason is simple: Parscale wasn’t a traditional political operative. He was a digital marketer.

Before politics pulled him into the spotlight, he was running a web development and digital marketing firm in Texas. His background was not built inside campaign war rooms or policy think tanks. It was built inside the performance marketing ecosystem—the part of the internet where every click, conversion, and message gets tested, measured, and optimized relentlessly.

That mindset changes how you approach persuasion.

Traditional political campaigns historically revolved around television advertising, polling, and broad messaging meant to reach large groups of voters simultaneously. It was mass media thinking applied to politics. You bought airtime, ran a few variations of a message, and hoped the polling numbers moved.

The digital marketing world operates completely differently.

In that environment, nothing is static. Messaging is constantly tested. Audiences are broken into micro-segments. Creative is rotated, adjusted, and optimized in real time. Data flows back instantly from user behavior. Campaigns don’t rely on intuition alone—they rely on feedback loops.

The Trump campaign in 2016 leaned into that system in a way most political operations had not yet fully embraced.

Instead of running a handful of television-style political ads, the campaign reportedly deployed tens of thousands of variations of digital ads simultaneously across platforms like Facebook. Different headlines. Different images. Different emotional triggers. Different demographic segments.

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In the heart of Florida’s child welfare system, there exists a jarring contrast between financial magnitude and administrative failure. Residing Hope, a faith-based organization formerly known as the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home, commands an asset base of approximately $87.1 million and absorbs over $8.6 million in annual Medicaid revenue. Yet, despite this massive infrastructure, the organization and eight other linked institutions failed to perform the most basic due diligence: verifying a simple, publicly available court order.

This systemic blind spot was uncovered through an exhaustive forensic analysis of a 1,883-page record corpus—184 individual files that document a devastating erasure. The data reveals a "statutory trade-off" gone wrong: a father who paid $1,000 in child support every month for 42 consecutive months—consistently $200 above the court-ordered amount—was effectively scrubbed from his child’s life by nine different organizations simultaneously.

Despite fulfilling every financial obligation of the law and maintaining a record with zero findings of abuse or neglect, this father was transformed into a legal ghost. His story is not merely one of clerical error; it is a human-centric analysis of how complex systems can manufacture an "unverified narrative" that overrides the law, the public record, and the fundamental rights of a parent.

Takeaway 1: The Ghost Order—How a Single Keystroke Overrode the Law

The core of this erasure lies in a stark discrepancy between the public record and private institutional files. The Orange County Public Court Docket contains the operative legal truth: a parenting plan reflecting Shared Parental Responsibility. Under Florida law, this grants both parents co-equal rights to information and decision-making. However, 54 different institutional records—including intake forms, medical authorizations, and school enrollments—asserted that the mother held "Sole Court-Ordered Custody."

This "Ghost Order" traces back to a June 9, 2023, letter from Elizabeth Anne Tener, a partner at Greenspoon Marder who notably sits on the Florida Bar’s Rules Committee. This letter—which claimed the child’s location would not be disclosed to the father—acted as a "pseudo-order." From that single point of entry, the unverified claim propagated through the system like a digital virus. Institutions accepted the assertion of sole custody at face value, circumventing the most basic rule of legal administration: checking the public docket.

This represents a severe "Compliance Tension." Organizations chose to rely on an unverified narrative provided by a high-profile attorney over their statutory mandate to verify legal authority. In this administrative reality, the word of a lawyer whose career is built on "the rules" was used to bypass the actual rules of the court.

"The truth doesn't need permission."

Takeaway 2: "Father Has No Rights"—The Danger of Institutional Gatekeeping

When a system decides a parent is "absent" based on unverified data, it creates a dangerous information access disparity. In this case, the gatekeeping was documented and defended by high-level administrators. Kevin Egan, the COO of Residing Hope, explicitly directed the father to obtain information only through the "mother's discretion," erroneously referring to her as the child's "guardian"—a specific legal designation that does not exist in the court’s parenting plan.

This episode introduces the core concept behind the investigation: the “silver bullet.” In complex disputes involving family law, schools, healthcare providers, and residential programs, the decisive moment often is not a court ruling. It is the moment when a single unverified claim enters an institutional record and begins to propagate through the system.

The episode examines how statements made in attorney correspondence, intake narratives, or administrative forms can become treated as verified fact once they appear in official documentation. Institutions downstream—schools, hospitals, residential facilities, insurers—frequently rely on information received from earlier institutions without independently verifying the underlying legal authority. Over time, repeated references to the same claim create the appearance of legitimacy even if the original claim was never confirmed against operative legal documents.

In a legal framework built on shared parental responsibility, this process carries real consequences. Florida law presumes that both parents retain equal rights to information about their child unless a court specifically orders otherwise. Notification, participation in educational planning, and access to records are not discretionary privileges extended by institutions. They are statutory rights. When an institution accepts one parent’s representation of authority without verification, the resulting administrative record can affect every downstream decision.

This episode explores the mechanism by which these records propagate. It looks at the intake process used by institutions, the transfer of information between organizations, and the incentives that discourage verification once a claim appears in an earlier record. The discussion introduces the concept of “structured irresponsibility,” a term used in organizational theory to describe systems where accountability is distributed across so many actors that no single entity feels responsible for verifying the original information.

The central investigative question posed in this episode is simple: when institutional records contain a claim about parental authority, who verified that claim against the court docket before acting on it?

Understanding that question is the foundation for the entire series. Future episodes will examine how custody representations move through institutional systems, how parental notification obligations are implemented in practice, and how administrative records shape decisions across schools, healthcare providers, and residential facilities.

The episode also previews several topics the series will explore in detail, including institutional verification procedures, educational compliance obligations under parental rights statutes, the role of legal counsel in information gatekeeping, and the structural incentives that allow notification failures to accumulate across organizations.

All analysis presented in the episode is based on publicly available statutes, institutional policies, and records provided by one party to a dispute. The discussion represents a structured analysis of those materials rather than a legal finding. Institutions and individuals referenced have not had the opportunity to respond in this format. Listeners are encouraged to review primary source documents and applicable law before forming conclusions.

Topics Covered

– What the “silver bullet” concept means in institutional systems

– How administrative records become treated as verified facts

– Why downstream institutions rely on upstream documentation

– The legal architecture of shared parental responsibility

– The concept of structured irresponsibility in complex systems

– The central investigative question driving the series

Podcast: AI Visibility Podcast
Episode Title: The Players — Every Name, Every Role, Every Public Record
Host: Jason Wade — Founder, NinjaAI
Series: Special Investigation
Runtime: ~50 minutes

In this investigative episode of the AI Visibility Podcast, host Jason Wade walks through the individuals whose names appear in the institutional records examined in the “Ghost Custody” investigation.

The episode follows the document trail behind 54 institutional records across nine organizations that reference the custody status “sole court-ordered custody.”

However, the public court docket for the case reflects shared parental responsibility, and no sole custody order appears in the file.

Rather than focusing on documents alone, this episode examines the people connected to those records — attorneys, administrators, clinicians, and institutional actors whose decisions shaped how the custody narrative spread across multiple organizations.

The episode profiles each individual using publicly available records, professional licensing databases, and documented correspondence.

• 54 institutional records referencing “sole court-ordered custody”
• 9 institutions appearing in the document set
• 31 months of documented institutional propagation
• 0 court orders in the public docket granting sole custody

The episode examines how administrative systems can replicate custody claims when institutions rely on previous records instead of verifying the court file.

Jason Wade
Father in the case and host of the AI Visibility Podcast. Public records show continuous child support payments exceeding the court-ordered amount for more than forty consecutive months.

Diana K. Bjorkman Wade
Mother referenced in institutional records as holding “sole court-ordered custody,” despite the public docket reflecting shared parental responsibility.

Elizabeth Ann Tener
Partner at Greenspoon Marder LLP and former chair of the Florida Bar Family Law Rules Committee. Correspondence from June 2023 appears as the earliest documented point in the timeline where the custody characterization begins appearing in institutional files.

Kevin Egan, Ed.D.
Chief Operating Officer of Residing Hope. Institutional communications referenced in the episode directed the father to route information requests through legal counsel.

F.A. “Alex” Ford Jr., Esq.
Attorney with Landis Graham French, P.A. who appears in correspondence regarding institutional responses to the father’s records requests.

Yolaine Cotel, LMHC
Licensed Mental Health Counselor referenced in intake documentation associated with the child’s residential placement.

Dr. Aarti Patel, M.D.
Florida-licensed physician identified in institutional records as the prescribing psychiatrist during the placement period.

Alexis Crouthers Brown, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist referenced in clinical documentation as the primary family therapist during the residential placement.

Neva Baltzell, MAS
Campus Director at Madison Youth Ranch, a program associated with Residing Hope, referenced in administrative coordination records.

Additional Individuals Referenced

Pamela Kae Bjorkman — maternal grandmother listed in institutional records as an authorized contact.

Margot Fadool — individual referenced in public records related to the household environment during the time period examined in the investigation.

• Residing Hope — residential treatment facility in DeLand, Florida

• Trinity Preparatory School — private educational institution referenced in records requests

• Greenspoon Marder LLP — law firm appearing in correspondence

• Landis Graham French, P.A. — law firm representing the residential facility

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AI Visibility Podcast Releases Investigative Episode Examining Custody Designation Found in 54 Institutional Records

LAKELAND, Florida — The AI Visibility Podcast has released a new investigative episode analyzing how a custody designation appeared repeatedly across institutional records despite not appearing in the public court docket.

The episode, titled “Residing Lies: How a Single Custody Claim Entered 54 Institutional Records and No One Checked the Court Docket,” examines a dataset of publicly available records compiled over a thirty-one-month period. The investigation identifies fifty-four documents across nine institutions that contain the phrase “sole court-ordered custody,” including medical intake files, residential treatment documentation, school enrollment records, insurance documentation, and administrative correspondence.

According to the analysis presented in the episode, the Orange County court docket does not contain an order granting sole custody corresponding to the designation appearing in those institutional records.

The investigation was conducted using AI-assisted document analysis techniques including optical character recognition, document indexing, and phrase clustering to identify repeated custody language across otherwise unrelated institutional records. More than two hundred data points were analyzed from public sources including court dockets, IRS Form 990 filings, property records, and institutional correspondence headers.

The episode explores how a custody designation can propagate through administrative systems when institutions rely on prior records rather than verifying primary source documents. The analysis describes what the host calls a “record propagation cascade,” in which a claim introduced into one institutional record can be replicated across multiple organizations without direct verification against the court file.

Institutions referenced in the analysis include medical providers, a residential treatment facility, educational institutions, and legal representatives connected to administrative communications referenced in the records.

The investigation also raises broader questions regarding institutional verification procedures, parental access rights under Florida law, and the administrative processes used when custody designations influence medical, educational, and residential decisions involving minor children.

The episode does not make accusations against any individual and states that all individuals referenced are presumed innocent. The investigation is presented as a public-records analysis examining how institutional documentation practices function when custody information is entered into administrative systems.

Host Jason Wade is the founder of NinjaAI, a research and technology initiative focused on AI visibility, information architecture, and large-scale document analysis. The episode also demonstrates how AI tools can assist in reviewing large collections of public records to identify patterns that may not be immediately visible through traditional document review methods.

The full episode and supporting documentation are available online.

Media inquiries and access to the public-records dataset referenced in the investigation can be requested through the sites listed below.

Listen to the episode and review the analysis at:

CanDadTalk.com
NicosDay.com
WadeVWade.com
RonsRights.com

About the AI Visibility Podcast

The AI Visibility Podcast examines how information spreads through institutional systems, how AI tools can assist investigative analysis of public records, and how information architecture influences what organizations know — and what they miss.