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The One Thing You Wish Your Clients Had Already Done

A favorite question of mine when I talk to other professionals is: “You’ve been doing this a long time, you see patterns. What do you most often say to your clients (or wish you could say) about how they could have helped themselves before…
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Valuing Private Companies in Divorce

The toughest nut to crack in many divorce asset searches is the private company. While people always want immediate access to bank accounts (and aren’t allowed to get them without discovery), you can always start to try to figure out what…
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Financial Investigators: Don’t Forget About Emotion

In a financial investigation it’s easy to get buried under all the words and numbers and to forget about emotions – those of your client, the person you’re investigating, and your own. It’s understandable but something to guard against. Theballetspot.com If…
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Good Due Diligence: Buy Back Your Future Mistake for 0.28 Percent

You want to invest $3 million into a real estate project. Time is tight because it’s closing in 12 days. The developer (51 years old) seems to have a decent track record and takes credit for billions of dollars of projects, but this project…
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Giving it Away is Great for Business

When was the last time you gave something away from your professional practice? I’m not talking about pens, calendars or tote bags. When did you give away knowledge about what you do? Not, “Look at the results we get,” but rather, “Here’s…
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The Small Business Landlord-Tenant Wars Have Begun

The big guys have been going bankrupt, but the real carnage is yet to come:. Among America’s small businesses. Potential creditors need to get organized for the fight which appears to have been kicked off in New York this month with a fascinating…
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The Missing Piece in an Asset Search

Clients who hire us for asset searches always want to know what we find. As often as not, the big news after an asset search is when we don’t find something we should be seeing but are not. When someone is concealing the truth, they often…
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Artificial Intelligence: In Law, Logic Only Goes So Far

Do you ever wonder why some gifted small children play Mozart, but you never see any child prodigy lawyers who can draft a complicated will? The reason is that the rules of how to play the piano have far fewer permutations and judgment calls…
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The Difference Between Fact Checking and Asset Searching

A fascinating interview with the chief fact checker for The New Yorker in the Columbia Journalism Review here got us thinking about the distinction between checking the veracity of facts and finding new ones. Our firm does both, dealing mostly…
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How Investigation Helps Forensic Accountants

What’s wrong with using a forensic accountant in your hunt for a spouse’s hidden assets? Nothing, provided you hand that accountant all the pertinent information you can. We’ve mentioned the need for these professionals frequently on our…