He probably did stumble across it, but only after working his way through stacks of case law books.
The point here is that the references and links to the case were deliberately removed from multiple legal research computer data bases and their associated search engines, all of which are very good at searching and locating relevant case law.
Instead, he had to go back through 25 + years of actual hard copy bound volumes of Az Appeals case law to locate the relevant precedents. This is a lot of work with a huge volume of documents to review.
More importantly, the presiding judge was also unable to locate the hidden and seemingly suppressed case work that supported Lakes claims so he formulated his legal theory and drafted his decision on both partial and outright incorrect knowledge of the relevant law governing the Lake election challenge. .
This is highly irregular and pretty much everyone in the legal system realizes that this simply does not happen by accident. If the case was removed from an official Az state legal data base that removal may actually rise to the level of a criminal act.
It also suggests an attempt to conceal evidence in order to further a act of election fraud.
Did this actually happen though, I want more details.