Not as magic bullets, but as helpful reference librarians.
Remember in middle school when you had to write a report about how many lobsters were caught in Maine each year? You went into the library and told the librarian your project.
She (and in my middle school days, it was
Clients who have seen the online “Nationwide criminal background check, $69” come-ons sometimes ask why we won’t ever say that someone has no criminal record.
They also wonder why doing a proper criminal check in even a single state costs more than $69.
This is why:
Remember those law school exams that depended not as much on getting the right answer as on issue spotting? Usually you got a fact pattern and you had to look at all the ways those facts would present interesting legal questions for a judge to consider.
Investigation is something like this, but instead of legal
For those of us who thought Jeffrey Epstein probably had a larger group of rich and powerful acquaintances than we had known about, the Wall Street Journal appears to have proven us right.
A story over the weekend says the following people spent a little (or quite a lot of time) with Epstein even after
Hiring good people is getting a lot harder, and not just because there are fewer candidates in a lot of industries. With AI-enabled cheating, grade inflation, and the shunning of standardized tests by colleges and graduate schools, how is a hiring manager supposed to know who’s a good fit?
My prediction: Good companies will have
ChatGPT now comes up in most of the extended conversations I have with lawyers about how things are going. Many rave about how easy it is to have this robot whip up a simple motion or even, in one example, “a short speech about NATO defense capabilities.”
While it may be true that ChatGPT can
In a financial investigation it’s easy to get buried under all the words and numbers and to forget about emotions – those of your client, the person you’re investigating, and your own.
It’s understandable but something to guard against.
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?”
You want to invest $3 million into a real estate project. Time is tight because it’s closing in 12 days. The developer (51 years old) seems to have a decent track record and takes credit for billions of dollars of projects, but this project doesn’t yet have zoning approval and the previous owner dumped the
One indispensable part of due diligence is to check for regulatory sanctions. Was a company found by the SEC or FINRA to have misappropriated investor money? Put them in unsuitable investments? Lied on a filing to induce people to invest money under false pretenses?
While we never pronounce “Invest” or “Don’t Invest,” “Hire” or “Don’t