Everyone would love to have more information, but getting information is not always free. At what point does it become too expensive to pay for more?
We get this question a lot, especially when divorcing parties call us directly about our asset search services.
Firstly, before you file for divorce there are lots of things
Now and again a client comes to us for information on a spouse’s assets. But if the client has already signed a power of attorney, the search could involve both spouses’ assets.
A power of attorney between married people could work like this: Wife grants Husband the power to buy and sell things on Wife’s
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
Finding assets can be satisfying work, but frustration sometimes comes in realizing that a client’s lawyers haven’t been asking the right questions in their depositions.
We have written repeatedly that getting bank account information without a court order is illegal (other than discovering it on a shared computer or in records lying around). When we
We’ve written plenty about why it makes sense to do an onshore search within the U.S. when you’re looking for offshore assets. See for instance our Offshore Assets Playbook and here.
What comes as news to many clients is how secretive people are allowed to be with their assets right here in the U.S.
In the past month, two divorcing clients contacted us and wanted asset searches performed without signing up us through their divorce lawyers. Here is the advice we gave them, as we give all our clients:
“Sign us up through your lawyer. If your husband ever discovers that we are looking at him, he could subpoena
If an investigator told you he could get you some cocaine or find you a way to conduct illegal business with North Korea, would you say “go ahead” simply based on the idea that it could be done?
We ask people this question fairly often when they ask us to get bank account information of
GPS trackers are among the hottest topics in ethics discussions today. At least, that is my impression after a series of ethics lectures I’ve given around the country based on my book, The Art of Fact Investigation.
We wrote three years ago about the need for caution before using one of these devices on
One of the most powerful tools a spouse had to monitor assets or other activities is to look at the shared computer of the spouse under investigation. We have written before in When You’re Allowed to Look Through Your Debtor’s Computers and Phones that as long as a person can show ownership of the computer,
The debate so far over whether Apple should help the U.S. government execute a warrant to see what is on one of its phones has focused on the information of a dead terrorist and the prospective data breach (according to Apple) of millions of law abiding citizens.
The stakes are high, but lost in the