What Languages Can Your Investigator Speak?
I think we can all agree that the more languages you can speak, the better off you will be, all other things being equal. AI instant translation is a great invention, but who wouldn’t want to be able to read a case or a newspaper article in Polish in the course of investigating a Polish subject? I recently figured out who was behind a Bulgarian company and did all the searches in Bulgarian, even though I don’t speak or read a word of the language.
I also spent hours on a website of a nearby country, again without a word of the language and no knowledge of its specific alphabet. I found out a fair amount, but when speaking to another investigator on the case, found that he had noticed oddities in the tone of some of the entries – something I could never pick up. That was not a problem for me since I had not sold myself as knowing the language, but the client was interested in the architecture of the website, and that was something I could look at.
My foreign language abilities are limited to the rusty French I grew up speaking in Canada but no longer use, and the near dormant Spanish I learned when working in Mexico City (coming in with fluent French helped). I managed to do an investigation using Spanish texts recently, but then needed a fluent Spanish speaker to get on the phone with the person we were looking at since I couldn’t pull off a native speaker role I was supposed to be.
But I do boast two other language abilities that many investigators don’t have: the languages of law and accounting/business.
- To any law school graduate, a case full of what once seemed like an impenetrable thicket of Latin, indecipherable citations and other terms turns out to be something you can navigate fairly easily. What you end up learning how to do is figure out how this case relates to other cases involving the same person, where it is procedurally, and what the main issues were.
Of course, a detailed case about a tax controversy or a fine point of pension law will baffle me, but those are not the kinds of cases I need to read. What did Mr. X allegedly do to get himself sued by his business partners? What did Mr. Y say in his counterclaim when a customer said he was a thief? Which counts are still at issue?
I’ve had contractors without legal training who simply could not get past page 3 of a standard issue Southern District of New York fraud complaint. They didn’t speak Legal, it turned out.
- Accounting and business. If you’re doing due diligence on a person who used to be a CFO and left behind an accounting scandal, it’s not enough to report to your client that “there was an accounting scandal.” You have to be able to explain the issue. What were the allegations? Did they hold up in court? If four of seven counts were dismissed, what were the other ones and what was our person’s role in the scandal? Active participation? Looking the other way? Incompetence?
People who go to law school and can read cases often turn out to be thoroughly uninterested in business. I’ve had people with legal training ask me questions such as, “What’s a medium-term note program?” I’ve seen lawyers unable to read an annual report, unable to navigate a Form 4 report from the SEC which says very clearly in tiny footnote that the person was compensated not personally but through a Delaware LLC he controls.
Law and accounting have their own terms, their own understanding of what words mean. Evidence we find should be admissible. Companies are not profitable under GAAP, but are under adjusted EBITDA, and so on. You don’t just own a house – you have net equity in the house dependent on valuation and liabilities.
Life is interesting but you have to have shortcuts to get it all down on paper. Law and accounting have the shortcut language, and our job as investigators is to look at all that shorthand and turn it back into real life so we can tell an intelligible story about the people and companies we profile.
My French and Spanish are lousy, but my law and accounting? Fluent.
