Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

A document is "authenticated" when testimony, either oral or written, is provided from a witness that would have custody of the document. The testimony provides a foundation for recognition and identification of the document. For example, if the documents were medical records, and were attached to a lay person's declaration, they would lack authentication and be hearsay. To make them admissible, they would have to be attached to a declaration from the doctor who prepared them, and kept them in the ordinary course of business.

The reason that defense counsel got away with it was because he knew you were representing yourself and would most likely not object.

If you look at the documents submitted by the defense lawyer, one of them contains a a Declaration of the lawyer in which the lawyer declares under penalty of perjury that the documents are what they claim to be. You, since you don't know what you are doing, failed to do this, so your evidence wasn't considered by the court. But winning the case obviously isn't important to you, or you would have retained counsel.

The way you authenticate a document is you go to law school and learn how to do it and then you do it, or you pay some one who has gone to law school and learned how to do it to do it for you. If you don't do either of those things, your evidence is thrown out as hearsay and you lose.