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Artificial intelligence doesn’t equal artificial perfection. I have argued for a while now both on this blog and in a forthcoming law review article here that lawyers (and the investigators who work for them) have little to fear and much to gain as artificial intelligence gets smarter.

Computers may be able to do a lot more than they used to, but there is so much more information for them to sort through that humans will long be required to pick through the results just as they are now. Right now, we have no quick way to word-search the billions of hours of YouTube videos and podcasts, but that time is coming soon.

The key point is that some AI programs will work better than others, but even the best ones will make mistakes or will only get us so far.

So argues British math professor Hannah Fry in a new book previewed in her recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, here. Fry argues that instead of having blind faith in algorithms and artificial intelligence, the best applications are the ones that we admit work somewhat well but are not perfect, and that require collaboration with human beings.

That’s collaboration, not simply implementation. Who has not been infuriated at the hands of some company, only to complain and be told, “that’s what the computer’s telling me.”

The fault may be less with the computer program than with the dumb company that doesn’t empower its people to work with and override computers that make mistakes at the expense of their customers.

Fry writes that some algorithms do great things – diagnose cancer, catch serial killers and avoid plane crashes. But, beware the modern snake-oil salesman:

Despite a lack of scientific evidence to support such claims, companies are selling algorithms to police forces and governments that can supposedly ‘predict’ whether someone is a terrorist, or a pedophile based on his or her facial characteristics alone. Others insist their algorithms can suggest a change to a single line of a screenplay that will make the movie more profitable at the box office. Matchmaking services insist their algorithm will locate your one true love.

As importantly for lawyers worried about losing their jobs, think about the successful AI applications above. Are we worried that oncologists, homicide detectives and air traffic controllers are endangered occupations? Until there is a cure for cancer, we are not.

We just think these people will be able to do their jobs better with the help of AI.

Another EB-5 visa fraud, more burned investors. For people outside the United States trying to pick a reputable investment that will get them permanent residency in the U.S., sorting through hundreds of projects is often the hardest part of the job.

EB-5 due diligence

There is plenty written about what you should do before you invest, one of the latest guides being from the North American Securities Administrators Association, here. You can read up on EB-5 frauds here.

What are the warning signs of fraud? Last year’s revelation of a huge fraud at a Vermont development that had sucked in hundreds of investors led many to wonder, “How could we have known this would blow up?”

There is no guaranteed way to find fraud, but if you see things that would give a prudent investor pause; if the project’s sponsors don’t have a good track record; if you don’t understand the risks of the project (and they all have risks) walk away.

Remember, many reputable immigration lawyers refuse to recommend an EB-5 investment because they don’t want to be sued if the investment encounters problems, whether of a normal business variety or because of fraud. Even if your lawyer recommends an investment, you should still perform due diligence on the project.

Even more surprising to some non-Americans, once the government spots EB-5 fraud, it’s often too late for the investors who have put in their money. Sometimes investors can recover and sometimes not, but the green cards they wanted will not be delivered and they have lost time in addition to money.

Looking at the track record of a developer is much easier than going through the hundreds of pages of documents you and your lawyer will need to examine before you invest your money. You will always need to do both, but as you sort through five or ten possible investments, start with the track records.

The Vermont Fraud Warning Signs

One of the most celebrated of all the projects was the group of investments in the northeastern state of Vermont, near the border with Canada. Jay Peak was an old ski hill that fell into the hands of a Canadian operating company. They began with the EB-5 program by raising money for one project, but then in 2008 the Canadian company sold the business to a man local press described as “mysterious,” Ariel Quiros. He grew up in New York, was of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan background, but had spent years in Korea building unspecified businesses which supposedly gave him the ability to buy Jay Peak for $25 million.

Once Quiros bought the mountain, the EB-5 projects accelerated, with six more projects for hotels and finally, before the scheme was exposed, a bio-technology park that was supposed to flourish among the ski hills and dairy farms of far-northern Vermont.

The main thing an investor should have asked about Jay Peak was, who exactly is Ariel Quiros, the owner? The whole sickening unravelling of the investment project is available at vtdigger.org (going from most recent to oldest story). But anyone investing after January 14, 2014 would have had an easy way to throw this one in the waste basket. A Vermont Digger article available on line described Quiros’ track record this way:

  • He lost his seat on the board of Bioheart Inc. after AnC Bio [Quiros’ company] failed to make the second installment in a $4 million investment.
  • Quiros also survived a Texas lawsuit in which two investors alleged breach of contract after they didn’t get their money back in full in 10 years.
  • And a Florida man claims he never received almost $16,000 worth of equipment from a [Quiros] company called Q Vision, but he appears to have dropped his pursuit of the matter.

Of course, full due diligence could involve verifying the assertions in this article, but if they turned out to be true, who would entrust half a million dollars and a green card to someone with a track record of not following through on investments and unhappy investors alleging breach of contract?

If Quiros occasionally had disputes with investors and partners, you would also ask a more basic question: how did he make his money – the money that bought Jay Peak — in the first place?

The article in January 2014 said,

“Quiros has melded street smarts from New York, military sensibilities from the Korean Demilitarized Zone and a love of adventure into a business empire that spans the globe, starting with international trade from Korea in the early 1980s… GSI Group, where he got his start in Korea, imported and exported goods ranging from shoes to women’s blouses to radios…He specialized in raw materials, much of it for the Korean government, he says.”

In addition, Bloomberg says that “Mr. Quiros serves as a Director and Principal of GSI Group, a raw materials procurement company for the South Korean manufacturing community with offices in Seoul, Beijing, Sydney, Hong Kong and Miami.”

The only problem is, GSI is one difficult company to find. Quiros shows up on open-source databases as a corporate officer of 96 companies, but these are all in Florida, Panama and Vermont. None of the Florida companies are called GSI.

On line, there is www.GSIkoreanet., but this mentions no overseas offices. GSI Australia’s website says it is a company dealing in poultry, swine and grain. There are no Korean links evident. And it is based in Queensland and Victoria, not New South Wales where Sydney is. The Australia companies registry provides no evidence of any Korean trading company registered in New South Wales.

In Hong Kong, a search of directors of all Hong Kong companies shows that nobody named Quiros and no company called GSI directs any Hong Kong company.

A search of regulatory filings in the U.S. turns up nothing on Quiros until 2010, after he bought Jay Peak. A news search on Bloomberg turns up only GSI Group Inc., a maker of agricultural equipment.

The earliest mention of Quiros in securities filings in the U.S. is in 2011, as an investor in a U.S. biotech company. His Korean address in this filing was: 10th Floor, H&S Tower, 119-2 Nonhyun-Dong, Gangnam-Gu, Seoul, Korea 135-820. A reverse search of this address turns up nothing on GSI.

Are we therefore stunned to learn today that according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Quiros never used his own money to buy Jay Peak in the first place? Instead, according to the judicial complaint filed in 2016, Quiros took money investors had already put into Jay Peak when it was owned by the Canadians, and used that cash to buy the ski resort.

Subsequent cash that came in for new projects funded prior projects, but eventually the game was up when Quiros told investors that their hotel project was cancelled and converted into a loan. They would get their money back, he promised, but green cards would not be forthcoming. Quiros is fighting the SEC, while his President has settled with the agency.

In the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, there were red flags that sent many prudent investors away: a small-time accountant for what was supposed to be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, and no independent custodian for the investor money.

In the case of Quiros and the Vermont project, a history of unhappy investors and a murky source of funds should have been enough for investors to say, “Not this one.”

 

About the firm:

Charles Griffin Intelligence is an independent consulting firm that performs investor due diligence for hedge funds, corporations and individuals both inside and outside the United States. We never do work for any EB-5 developer or regional center. We do not provide legal advice, but can help investors and their lawyers assess the business risk of an investment.

For more information about the firm, please see the website at www.charlesgriffinllc.com. You can also read our blog, The Ethical Investigator, at www.ethicalinvestigator.com

 

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 all need good facts. Without decent facts, they face dismissal or don’t even get to the complaint stage.Better innovation in law firms

Do law schools teach any of these skills? Ninety-nine percent do not.  Good fact-finding requires something not taught at a lot of law schools: innovation and creativity. Of course, good judges can maneuver the law through creative decisions, and good lawyers are rightly praised for creative ways to interpret a regulation or to structure a deal.

But when it comes to fact gathering, the idea for most lawyers seems to be that you can assign uncreative, non-innovative people to plug data into Google, Westlaw or Lexis, and out will come the data you need.

This is incorrect, as anyone with a complex matter who has tried just Googling and Westlaw research will tell you.

The innovative, creative fact finder follows these three rules:

  1. Free Yourself from Database Dependency. If there were a secret trove of legally obtained information, you would be able to buy it because this is America, where good products get packaged and sold if there is sufficient demand for them. And Google won’t do it all. Most documents in the U.S. are not on line, so Google won’t help you. For any given person, there could be documents sitting in one of the more than 3,000 counties in this country, in paper form.
  • If you use a database, do you know how to verify the output? Is your John C. Wong the same John C. Wong who got sued in Los Angeles? How will you tell the difference? You need a battle plan. Can your researcher arrange to have someone go into a courthouse 2,000 miles away from your office?
  • How will you cope with conflicting results when one source says John C. Wong set up three Delaware LLC’s last year, and another says he set up two in Delaware and two in New York?
  1. Fight Confirmation Bias. Ask, “What am I not seeing?” Computers are terrible at the kind of thought that comes naturally to people. No risk management program said about Bernard Madoff, “His auditor can’t be up to the task because his office is in a strip mall in the suburbs.”
  • For your researchers, find people who can put themselves in the shoes of those they are investigating. Not everyone can say, “This report must be wrong. If I were in the high-end jewelry business, I wouldn’t run it out of a tiny ranch house in Idaho. Either this is a small business or Idaho’s not the real HQ.” If someone doesn’t notice a discrepancy as glaring as this, they are the wrong person to be doing an investigation that requires open-mindedness.
  1. Don’t paint by numbers. Begin an investigation on a clean sheet of paper. Don’t base your investigation on what someone’s resume says he did. Verify the whole thing.
  • Look not just at what’s on the resume, but look for what was left off Jobs that didn’t go well, and people who don’t like the person.
  • Despite that your client tells you, they don’t know everything (if they did they wouldn’t hire you). If your client thinks you will never find a subject’s assets outside of Texas, look outside of Texas anyway. You owe it to your client.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

We don’t usually think of the law as the place our most creative people go. Lawyers with a creative bent often drift into business, where a higher risk tolerance is often required to make a success of yourself. Some of our greatest writers and artists have legal training, but most seem to drop out when their artistic calling tells them law school isn’t for them.

Group of Robots and personal computer vector illustration

Still, creativity and innovation are all the rage in law schools today. Northwestern has a concentration in it as does Vanderbilt, and Harvard has a course on Innovation in Legal Education and Practice.

Like it or not, as artificial intelligence takes over an increasing number of dreary legal tasks, there will be less room for dreary, plodding minds in law firms. The creative and innovative will survive.

This doesn’t worry us, because we’ve long talked about the need for creativity in fact finding. It’s even in the subtitle of my book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.

The book takes up the message we have long delivered to clients: computers can help speed up searching, but computers have also made searching more complex because of the vast amounts of information we need to sort through.

  • Deadlines are ever tighter, but now we have billions of pages of internet code to search.
  • Information about a person used to be concentrated around where he was born and raised. Today, people are more mobile and without leaving their base, they can incorporate a dozen companies across the country doing business in a variety of jurisdictions around the world.
  • Databases make a ton of mistakes. E.g. Two of them think I live in the house I sold seven years ago.
  • Most legal records are not on line. Computers are of limited use in searching for them, and even less useful if figuring out their relevance to a particular matter.
  • Since you can’t look everywhere, investigation is a matter of making educated guesses and requires a mind that can keep several plausible running theories going at the same time. That’s where the creativity comes in. How do you form a theory of where X has hidden his assets? By putting yourself in his shoes, based on his history and some clues you may uncover through database and public-record research.

The idea that technological change threatens jobs is hardly new, as pointed out in a sweeping essay by former world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the Wall Street Journal.

Twenty years after losing a chess match to a computer, Kasparov writes: “Machines have been displacing people since the industrial revolution. The difference today is that machines threaten to replace the livelihoods of the class of people who read and write articles about them,” i.e. the writer of this blog and just about anyone reading it.

Kasparov argues that to bemoan technological progress is “little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization … Machines that replace physical labor have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds.”

The great challenge in artificial intelligence is to use our minds to manage the machines we create. That challenge extends to law firms. We may have e-discovery, powerful computers and databases stuffed with information, but it still requires a human mind to sort good results from bad and to craft those results into persuasive arguments.

After all, until machines replace judges and juries, it will take human minds to persuade other human minds of the value of our arguments.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

What lesson does the Brexit vote hold for anyone conducting or contemplating fact investigation?

Don’t let confirmation bias muddy your thinking.

One of the key “Investigator’s Enemies” identified in my book, The Art of Fact Investigation, confirmation bias is what many of us tend to do when looking into an issue: we find what we expect (or want) to find.

Avoiding Confirmation Bias
Avoiding Confirmation Bias

The big money in last week’s British referendum was in favor of remaining within the European Union. It wasn’t just that large banks, corporations and the people who work there supported “Remain,” but that these people bet more heavily on their preferred outcome than those betting on Brexit.

The result? Even though opinion polls consistently pegged the race as very close, bookmakers in the UK put the odds of a Brexit victory at as little as 10 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

How could this be? For the simple reason that bookies like to balance their bets. Even though all voters in the U.K. got evenly weighted votes, bookies don’t evenly weight all bets. If you want to bet $400,000 on Remain and someone else bets $100 on Brexit, the odds will go heavily toward the Remain camp – whatever the polls say.

That may be what happened last week. So much money went against Brexit that those making — or in sympathy — with that outcome started to believe the odds and not the opinion polls.

How would this kind of skewed thinking work in an investigation?

Since all the information we have gathered about Mr. Jones is that he is a “New York guy,” we will not spend serious time looking outside New York to see whether he may have a litigation history or any commercial presence outside the city. We then could miss the apartment he quietly bought for himself in Miami two years ago, along with the companies he runs out of that apartment.

With confirmation bias, we might dismiss the idea of a Florida base because if he had such a thing, someone would have found it by now.

As with Brexit, we would assume that all of the “smart money’ was on one outcome (Brexit/New York) that we expect we will find.

Instead, a little smart inquiring (perhaps a database search nationwide on Jones, or a look at bet sizes for Brexit) would make us more informed and less beholden to our prejudices.

All people hold some form of prejudice when they begin an investigation. You need to have some pre-existing idea of where to look, since you can never look everywhere for everything. What we aim for is the judicious balance between inspired guessing and submitting to confirmation bias.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal about “Why the Virtual Reality Hype is About to Come Crashing Down” makes the simple point that computers haven’t caught up to all the permutations of real life to make a “virtual reality” headset experience resemble a genuine experience.

A short demo is one thing, but life goes on after the short demo is finished.

philip segal the art of fact investigation.JPG

“The dirty little secret about [virtual reality] is that the hardware has run ahead of the content,” says the Journal.

My view is that catching up to real life is something that it is hard to see computers doing anytime soon, a point made in my recently published book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.

The book makes the case that figuring out problems related to human behavior requires guesswork and the flexibility to change course when one series of guesses appears to be the wrong way forward. Computers are wonderfully flexible and free of emotional bias, but are completely unimaginative.

While computers can sort easily through data people enter onto their hard drives, they have a much harder time saying, “Here is something you should expect to find but do not.” Example: risk management programs failed to note the suspicious fact that Bernard Madoff’s alleged billions under management were audited by a tiny accounting firm in a suburban shopping mall. The computers did not say (because they were not programmed ahead of time to say), “I should be seeing a Big-Four auditor here but I don’t see it.”

But what about all the hype about “Big Data” and our ability to predict things based on billions or individual cases only a computer can keep track of?

The problem is that in some kinds of investigations (who is this particular person? What is the probable reaction of this particular company to litigation?) we don’t demand an answer about what other people or companies have done in the past.

Big data aggregates lots of individual results, but sometimes when the stakes are high, we want to disaggregate and find out what this particular person did at work eight years ago to prompt a departure left off a resume, or what this particular company’s board is like when faced with a lawsuit.

You won’t find those answers in any magical database. If you are lucky and smart, you will find some clues that will help you put together a probable story.

If that sounds less than the neat and tidy solution you were hoping for, who said real life was neat and tidy?

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

The current fight between Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice, which is trying to execute a search warrant in a criminal matter, has been framed by Apple and its defenders as a battle over privacy.

Apple is not arguing that the information sought should never be seen by the government. The company handed over all the information asked for in the warrant that had already been stored on Apple’s own servers, some of which is presumably still on the phone. Where Apple wants to draw the line is the privacy of its customers who don’t back up their phones on the cloud.

It’s not enough to say you want privacy, because privacy means so many things to different people across not just national borders but even within countries.

Mortgage recording means I can figure out how much you owe your bank. Your series of LLC’s you thought would keep your beneficial ownership a secret comes unraveled when you borrow money because banks want to see who’s at the end of the chain before they lend. When they lend, the rest of us can take a peek. Yet, some countries keep mortgage information private.

Do you have the right to make private the details of your divorce? If you live in New York you do. Because those records are sealed. In other states, how much you pay your former spouse in alimony and support is wide open for everyone to see. You might as well make your tax returns public.

Speaking of tax returns, those most confidential of documents: some European countries thought to be superior guardians of privacy put everyone’s income on the internet.

Some people don’t want information on their phone made less secure because the government could get a look at health information. Health information is private, except when you have national health insurance as does most of Europe and Canada. Then, your information is between you, your doctor, and the government. Some people would still call that privacy, but it’s not as private as if it were locked on an encrypted Apple phone.

As an opinion piece in the New York Times said today, nobody appointed Apple to be the definer of privacy. That’s something governments do when they draft constitutions and statutes that their courts interpret.

There is a sad piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the demise of librarians and university programs in library science, In the Age of Google, Librarians Get Shelved. computer investigation.jpg

People trained to run computers do not have the training to gather facts the way librarians do. I count as a loss the presence of libraries with I.T. help desks instead of librarians  

Not that a good professional investigator is the same as a reference librarian. Part of what we do is to pick up a phone or travel to interview people to get information that is not written down.

Still, most of the time the first step is to do a lot of reading of documents, and we ask ourselves some of the same questions a good reference librarian would ask. And while it’s true that Google searching reduces the need for elementary help on different kinds of research, we are firm believers that Google does not replace the connections made by an alert human mind. The main reasons are:

  1. Google is a business and promotes links that make money rather than links that may be useful to you. Sometimes that works if your interests are aligned with Google’s, and sometimes it doesn’t.
  2. Much of the world’s information is not on Google. Most court documents in the U.S., for instance, have never been scanned and made available on the internet. Of those that have been scanned, many are not keyword searchable via Google: you have to know from Google on which sites to do your keyword search.
  3. No database is good at talking to other databases. If major hospitals in the U.S. can’t get their dozen different computer systems to talk to one another, how is the entire world supposed to get sufficient information into the right format for Google to be able to spit it out in a fraction of a second?

The mistake librarians made was to call what they did a science. Fact investigation is as much art as science for the simple reason that you can’t look everywhere and read everything you find. There are dozens or hundreds of educated guesses involved in good investigation, as I write in my forthcoming book The Art of Fact Investigation, reviewed by Kirkus here.

Pity the librarians who can’t get work, but pity too the people who think that Google is all the help they need to get sufficient information for any but the most mundane inquiries.

Due diligence is all about following up on red flags, but if you don’t find them, there’s nothing on which to follow up.

Thus, our tireless refrain: turn over every piece of public record information you can about a person, and don’t leave it to others.finra DUE DILIGENCE.jpg

We were reminded of this by the story this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, which found that the brokerage industry regulator, FINRA, leaves a lot of red flags concerning members off its BrokerCheck website. While it’s laudable that FINRA recommends that investors check to see if brokers have ever been subjected to disciplinary action, that check is of limited use if bankruptcies, state-level actions and litigation are left off of BrokerCheck.

We have been writing for years about the need to do thorough searches when conducting due diligence on anyone – pre-employment, pre-deal, or during litigation. In Avoiding Due Diligence Failure: Following Up on Red Flags, we dealt with the problem of the Semmelweis reflex in due diligence.

This is when you want to confirm that someone who is supposed to be squeaky clean really is, and so you write off what looks like a problem in his past to database error. You can also see confirmation bias, in which people rely too heavily on bad or incomplete evidence that leads them to their desired conclusion.

But, before you even get to battling Semmelweis and bias in mishandling red flags, you have to see the flags in the first place. For that, we provide a non-exhaustive checklist to our clients of the kinds of sources we will check. We wrote about it here.  

It’s critically important to note that these sources are not checked on line much of the time, but on site. That’s because a lot of information at the county or state level is not available on the internet. You need a good network of on-site retrievers to go pull it at the courthouse and send it back to you. You then need to double check to make sure your retriever didn’t miss anything. While not everything is on line, abstracts of some matters may be. When you get your pile of documents back, it’s always good to make sure that everything you found on line is represented in the results.