Where do you start in deciding which investigator to hire for a sensitive job?
It should be a business of trust, just as it is when choosing someone to come up with an estate plan, to sue a former business partner, or to handle a complex tax situation. Despite the
We were asked recently about the ethics and legality of Dark Web searches, increasingly part of many investigations. I realized we had never posted on this issue and it’s about time.
Since a lot of what we use from the Dark Web is stolen information, can we make use of it?
In short, the answer
I was puzzled this week at the reaction to a bomb of a story by the Wall Street Journal. The paper’s rightfully cautious lawyers allowed it to go to press and declare that 131 federal judges had broken the law by hearing cases in which they or their families had a direct financial interest.
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
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,
Great work by the Atlanta Journal Constitution on an issue that’s bugged me for years: the brazen violation of federal law by investigators and the lawyers who hire them.
At issue is the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, meant to protect the confidentiality of banking records. You are not allowed to pretend to be someone
We’ve had a great response to an Above the Law op-ed here that outlined the kinds of skills lawyers will need as artificial intelligence increases its foothold in law firms.
The piece makes clear that without the right kinds of skills, many of the benefits of AI will be lost on law firms because you
One lawyer we know has a stock answer when clients ask him how good their case is: “I don’t know. The courts are the most lawless place in America.”
What he means is that even though the law is supposed to foster predictability so that we will know how to act without breaking our society’s
One of the most fruitful avenues of investigation is to look at material that nobody ever thought would harm them. That’s the kind of material people do not take great pains to hide. Why hide it when it won’t hurt you and there is so much else in the world to worry about?
Trusts set
Clients often ask us whether we tape-record phone calls we make in the course of an investigation. Our brief answer is, “never.” Here is why:
Some states allow tape recording conversations if one of the two people in the conversation is aware that a tape is rolling, but some require that