In honor of President’s Day (still officially known as Washington’s Birthday) a few thoughts about interviewing. There are so many more facts about ourselves that are in our heads (or the heads of people we know) than there are in databases and court cases. Many times, to get as much as the truth as we need, we are forced to do interviews. To see this for yourself, Google yourself. How much of what you know…

There is a widespread belief among lawyers and other professionals that investigators, armed only with special proprietary databases, can solve all kinds of problems other professionals cannot. While certain databases are a help, we often tell our clients that even if we gave them the output of all the databases our firm uses, they would probably still not be able to come to most of the conclusions we do. That is because databases have incomplete,…

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 home address, its square footage, the cost of the property and the taxes I pay on it,” as well as…

Not for the first time, the most compelling piece of information in an investigation is what isn’t there. We’ve written often before about the failure of databases and artificial intelligence to knit together output from various databases and I discussed the idea of what isn’t there in my book, The Art of Fact Investigation. Remember, two of the biggest red flags for those suspicious of Bernard Madoff were the absence of a Big Four…

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, commercial or legal matters for high-paying clients. It recounts a series of foul-ups, blown cover identities, arrests and other problems…

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…