Philip Segal

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Charles Griffin is headed by Philip Segal, a New York attorney with extensive experience in corporate investigations in the U.S. for AmLaw 100 law firms and Fortune 100 companies. Segal worked previously as a case manager for the James Mintz Group in New York and as North American Partner and General Counsel for GPW, a British business intelligence firm. Prior to becoming an attorney, Segal was the Finance Editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, and worked as a journalist in five countries over 19 years with a specialization in finance. In 2012, he was named by Lawline as one of the top 40 lawyers furthering legal education.  Segal has also been a guest speaker at Columbia University on investigating complex international financing structures, and taught a seminar on Asian economics as a Freeman Scholar at the University of Indiana.  He is the author of the book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload (Ignaz Press, 2016). He lectures widely on fact investigation and ethics to bar associations across the United States.

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Firm/Organization: Charles Griffin Intelligence LLC
Blogs: The Divorce Asset Hunter, The Ethical Investigator

Latest Articles

The college admissions scandal has been full of wonderful teachable moments – about ethics, humility, greed and corruption. Now for asset hunters there is a new nugget today: overpaying on purpose. As the Boston Globe reported yesterday, a municipal home assessor found it odd that a home in Needham, Massachusetts (near Cambridge, where Harvard is) sold for close to a million dollars even though it was assessed at $549,000. Why would someone overpay so…
Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V. The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered. Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing power, databases and algorithms, but by interviewing somebody. According to multiple reports, a suspect in a securities fraud case had heard about the admissions scamming going on and used it to bargain…
Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V. The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered. Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing power, databases and algorithms, but by interviewing somebody. According to multiple reports, a suspect in a securities fraud case had heard about the admissions scamming going on and used it to bargain…
Have you ever noticed that artificial intelligence always seems much more frightening when people write about what it will become, but then how it can seem like imperfect, bumbling software when writing about AI in the present tense? You get one of each in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The paper paints a horrific picture of what the ruthless secret police of the world’s dictatorships will be able to do with AI in The Autocrat’s …
At some point with nearly every asset search our firm conducts, we end up telling clients that finding assets is often more than a one-step process. The one step some people think we need to take is to consult some databases, and voila! A pot of gold they can easily seize. While there have been times when we discover real estate ownership in the name of the asset concealer, our clients in these cases usually…
One of the most frequently-asked questions new divorce-related clients ask us is: “If I need a forensic accountant can you do that?” The answer we give is that we are not forensic accountants, but you probably need us anyway because forensic accountants don’t do what we do. And, you may need a forensic accountant as well. Fact-finding and forensic accounting go together to give you a much better shot at finding assets than either function…
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 else in order to trick the bank into handing over account information, and with a few narrow exceptions, you need…
Ponzi
Nearly ten years on since the arrest of master Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi fraudsters are still with us. Maybe not with as much money as Madoff’s billions, but powerful enough to do a lot of damage. Being devoted to finding assets, this blog doesn’t usually talk about ways to lose them. But we have had asset searches in which we suspect money was lost in a Ponzi scheme. The schemer may have assets,…
The non-legal press doesn’t usually get very deep into questions of legal ethics, but New York Magazine did a reasonable job of it in its hard-hitting piece this week on “The Bad, Good Lawyer” David Boies. The article asks whether Boies has crossed an ethical line, principally in his work on behalf of Harvey Weinstein (This blog argued before that he did, in The Weinstein Saga: Now Featuring Lying Investigators, Duplicitous Journalists, Sloppy Lawyers.)…
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…