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?”
Keith Hernandez on Hitting and Why Investigators Should Take Note
When not at work, I like to do many things, and one of my favorites is to watch New York Mets baseball. Since moving to New York I’ve grown to love the team and I make common cause with the many Mets fans I run into (even in my Bronx neighborhood just a few stops
Beware of Optical Illusions in an Investigation
Many of us love optical illusions. It’s a safe thrill to know we’re being tricked, and yet are still unable to tell our brains to “get real” and stop the illusion.
When you’re doing an investigation, the same kind of thing can take over
The Ethics of Handling Stolen Data from the Dark Web
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
Can Your Investigator Interview Your Opponent’s Ex-Employees? A Good Test for Your Investigator Before You Hire
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
Why Your Investigator Should Have a Sense of Humor (Seriously)
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
The Changing Face of Privacy for Investigations
We always like to say that when we find out about a person, we do so without invading their privacy. That can still mean we find out a lot of things about them that they would rather keep secret, but those facts are derived from what we can legally look at: legal records, mortgages and
How to Improve Your On Line Security (Even if People Know Your Phone Number)
The New York Times published in interesting piece this week that was among its most popular: I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.
In it, the paper’s personal tech columnist Brian X. Chen explained how much information people can get about you with just your phone number. This includes “my current
The Bumbling Spies of Black Cube: Lawyers Beware
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,
Atlanta Paper Exposes Widespread Violation of Federal Law by Private Investigators and the Lawyers That Enable Them
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