background investigation

Listen to me explain why putting people at ease is the best way to elicit information from them. I don’t have a badge or a subpoena, so the key is to be nice to them and be interested in what they do, think, and feel. Get the podcast chat on Ernie Sander’s  “You Said What?”

Any litigator tasking interviews of potential witnesses needs to know about the no-contact rule (ABA Model Rule 4.2)[1], which forbids talking to represented people on the other side of a case. This also goes for most current employees of the other side —  certainly any employee senior enough to make critical decisions or

In a partially hilarious, partially disturbing article this week in The Wall Street Journal, “Facebook Has No Sense of Humor,” the Editor in Chief of the satirical website The Babylon Bee related that two patently ridiculous “news” stories had recently been fact-checked by Snopes: The Onion’s “Shelling From Royal Caribbean’s M.S. ‘Allure’ Sinks Carnival

If you haven’t seen the amusing and disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal this week about Black Cube, the band of former Mossad (Israeli secret service) agents, it’s worth a look.

The article explains that Black Cube’s people run around the world pretending to be people they are not, in order to investigate private,

Lawyers need to find witnesses. They look for assets to see if it’s worth suing or if they can collect after they win. They want to profile opponents for weaknesses based on past litigation or business dealings.

Every legal matter turns on facts. Most cases don’t go to trial, fewer still go to appeal, but