Attorneys possess a large range of resources and expertise, but adding a private investigator to that list of resources can help you reach beyond your limits and acquire crucial information to apply to your caseload.
Here is a compiled a list of attorneys’ top 10 uses for a PI:
1. Skip Locate: ICU Investigations can locate your subject, whether he or she is a witness or a significant asset to a case. Do you need us to serve the subject a subpoena? Do you need to locate and interview this witness? Do you need a client investigated to make sure they are telling the truth? ICU can utilize proprietary databases accompanied by field investigation techniques to locate the whereabouts of your subject and provide the most recent address and ownership information of such property.
2. Comprehensive Asset Search: We can uncover addresses, employment, motor vehicles (including boats, aircraft, and recreational vehicles), valuable property, litigation records, tax assessor records, real property ownership, UCC filings, and corporate affiliations. We can also identify locations of bank accounts if necessary, but permission of the subject or a court order is needed to access the details of such accounts.
3. Influence During Litigation: ICU’s investigative staff is available during litigation to provide the intelligence and sources such as internal investigations to help the settlement in your favor.
4. Implement Ruling: If your subject in question is using family members or friends to hide or scale their current assets, we are able to uncover this transfer or find where they are being hidden to help you enforce judgments.
5. Identify the Opponent: We can connect the dots between corporate affiliations or even just identifying who you are up against. Background checks, personal profiles, and litigation/prior claim searches can reveal plenty of information to gain negotiation power.
6. One Step Ahead: After identifying your opponent, investigators can use their history to identify any patterns in behavior, which in turn can be used to help you prepare for cross examination or making a deal.
7. Utilizing Investigators and Reports: Investigators, with their reports in tow, are available at your discretion to help you prepare for cross examination OR to give their testimony.
8. Electronic Forensics: Do you need to uncover evidence on a computer or cell phone that seems to have been erased to the naked eye? ICU can perform forensic work on devices to canvass data, such as emails and documents, and successfully pull information that has been wiped out.
9. Catch the Counterfeit: Private investigators are able to examine products and track where they may be slipping through the cracks.
10. Put the Puzzle Together: Documents and witnesses may have been lost in history, but can still be a crucial part of your case. We can go back through time to stitch together the historical information for many different scenarios (corporate history, vehicle or real estate title history, or find out where a trust fund should rightfully be going to).
And don’t forget, we can act as a fresh pair of eyes to any case. An outside perspective is always helpful.