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(This post was originally published in May 2015 and was updated in March 2021.)

Many people working in the private investigation business share a trait: They hoard their trade “secrets.”

I guess it’s pretty common in most businesses.

I assume they think they might lose their edge if they gave them away.

The truth is that most trade secrets are not really secrets at all. As one of the great 17th-century playwrights, Jean Racine, so eloquently put it, “There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”

So, before time reveals every investigator’s secrets, I’ll reveal a few. Here are nine investigative tools that every lawyer should know about.

TLOxp

Who is this person? Where do they live? Are there any criminal records against the person? How do I get an address and a telephone number?

These are just some of the core questions that come up on a daily basis from lawyers trying to track down an individual or wanting some basic information on people.

That’s where TLOxp comes in. TLOxp for Legal Professionals is a subscription service that provides access to billions of public and proprietary records that can be used to locate people, assets and critical details such as criminal histories and phone numbers. It is an essential tool that should not be overlooked.

Seriously, it’s an absolutely indispensable resource. And if your firm is using something like TruthFinder or BeenVerified to track people down, I strongly recommend you check out TLOxp. It’s like going from a Fiat to a Mercedes.

You can thank me later.

Archive.org

The Web is a living and breathing thing. It’s constantly changing. What might be published on a website one day may be gone the next — never to be seen again. While Google may cache the most recent version of a page, it doesn’t save it forever.

That’s where the Internet Archive, aka Archive.org, comes in. Archive.org not only provides a vast digital archive of various collections, but it also keeps an archive of the Web, with over 150 billion page captures.

Archive.org’s Wayback Machine can be used to see what previous versions of websites looked like or to visit websites that no longer exist. This can come in handy if you ever need to show that a website was publishing copyrighted materials, identify former executives of a company or gather information about a website that has been taken down.

They have archived 475 billion web pages. I am no accountant, but that’s a lot.

Most people know a little about its archiving of web pages, but did you know that Archive.org has also digitized 28 million books and texts and 14 million audio recordings like radio broadcasts, and you can search the closed captions of 2 million television news shows back to 2009?

LexisNexis/Westlaw

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Every first-year law student knows about LexisNexis and Westlaw.”

It’s true.

LexisNexis and Westlaw are essential tools for every lawyer, especially when it comes to researching case law.

What many lawyers don’t know, however, is that they also have some of the largest repositories of public and proprietary information on people and businesses. Most law firms don’t subscribe to the public records portion of the LexisNexis and Westlaw databases because it’s pretty cost-prohibitive if you’re not using them on a daily basis.

In addition to their vast repository of public records on matters such as criminal histories, civil litigation, property records and other public records, these databases represent two of the single largest collections of historical news.

DomainTools

With a little know-how and in about 18 minutes, anyone can set up a website and start publishing just about anything. But getting a handle on the individuals who are behind a website can be challenging. The simplest way is to look in the Whois.net directory to see who the current registrant/administrator is. The directory can provide a wealth of information, such as the email address and contact information for the person who is behind the website.

However, it’s usually not that easy. Many Most websites are now set up with a private or proxy domain registration, especially when the registrant is trying to hide acts of wrongdoing. While you may need to jump through enormous legal hoops to uncover the site owner’s identity, there may be an easier way.

Although the Whois directory will give you the current registrant, DomainTools will give you the entire registration history for the domain going back many years. So if the domain was owned by an individual and then transferred into a proxy service, you just might have struck gold.

Since 2018, a number of privacy laws have been passed with a lot of fancy acronyms, including the CCPA and the GDPR. The bottom line is that domain information is disappearing, but as of this moment, you can still get some good decent info. 

Bonus: Alternatively, you can check out ViewDNS.info, which is a totally free option. It’s not nearly as robust, but if you want a quick, down-and-dirty way to search for a domain by a name or email address, you can check that out. 

Skopenow

The fire hose of information available via open sources and social media has expanded rapidly over the past few years. There is so much information, it’s hard to impossible to easily collect, organize and digest all of it.

That’s where Skopenow comes in.

Skopenow is a fee-based service that offers information on an individual’s social profiles, blog posts, comments, social media posts, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, court records, family members, usernames, web sightings, pictures, screenshots and timestamps, as well as an alternative name (nickname) analysis.

Running a report from Skopenow can help you connect information using any number of data points that a layperson may fail to identify or connect.

Google

I know what you are thinking. Google is so popular it’s a verb.

But most people don’t use Google to its full potential.

For example, if you are searching for information on someone, there are at least five ways to search their name:

“John Doe” – The quote marks tell Google to search the exact phrase.

“John” “Doe” – This may seem repetitive of the above search, but the above results won’t provide results with John William Doe or John W. Doe. Searching with each word in quotes will return any results containing the two quoted words or phrases.

“Doe, John” – In some cases, the name may appear last name, first name.

“J. Doe” or “Doe, J.” – This will capture cases in which the first initial, last name format is used.

“John * Doe” – An asterisk is like using a wildcard, so this will produce results that contain, for example, John Michael Doe.

There are dozens of other advanced operators. A few of my favorites are:

“John Doe” (attack OR charge OR violate OR indict OR insult OR slander OR molest OR assault OR force OR abuse OR attack OR strike OR invasion OR assail) – This is a quick, down-and-dirty negative search string to see whether there is anything really bad out there on John Doe.

site:upenn.edu “john doe” – This search string will specifically search, for example, the University of Pennsylvania’s website to determine whether the name “John Doe” has appeared anywhere on it.

Filetype:pdf “John Doe” – This will return results of the name “John Doe” appearing in any PDF files.

Dig deeper: 6 Google Tricks That Will Turn You Into an Internet Detective and 8 Google Search Tricks Every Attorney Should Know

Newspapers.com

If you are looking for current or recent news, Googling, LexisNexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, Factiva or subscriptions to local news websites are your best bet.

But if you want some historical information, like from the 1980s or before, Newspapers.com is the way to go.

Newspapers.com is a subscription-based service that contains information from over 20,000 newspapers dating back to the 1700s. It also reportedly adds millions of additional pages each month. This is a great source for finding information that may not have made its way to Internet search engines.

PACER

If a client asks me to do a quick, down-and-dirty background check on someone, one of the first places I always go is PACER.

As you probably know, PACER is a free public service that allows users access to a comprehensive index of docket information from all United States district, appellate and bankruptcy courts. All available court filings are also accessible through the site for a small fee.

There are a few reasons that it’s one of the first databases I use:

  1. It’s quick and really cheap;
  2. It’s comprehensive in that it contains almost every single federal court (I think it’s missing a few) in the country dating back at least 15 years, sometimes much longer;
  3. Many state courts don’t have copies of legal filings online, but PACER does, so you can quickly get the gist of a proceeding or disposition;
  4. Bankruptcy records can prove to be a gold mine of information.

Judy Records

Judy Records is a relatively new public online service that reports being the largest court-related search engine in the United States, consisting of dockets and opinions from 481 million court cases.

Yes, you read that right — 481 million court cases!

The best thing about Judy Records is that it is free of charge.

Keep in mind that it’s got some serious limitations. Don’t for one second think that it’s comprehensive; but if you are looking for some quick results, this is a good starting point.

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3 replies
  1. Carol
    Carol says:

    Can a private investigator keep track of my whereabouts by my iphone? And can that investigator hack into my text messages?

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