We were hired by a fund of funds to look at a pair of hedge fund managers operating in the Midwest. We were not granted access to the individuals and were asked only to search the public record and media. We also searched litigation involving the two men in the four counties in which they had lived and worked during their careers, as well as litigation involving their previous funds in counties in which those funds had been based and where their major customers were.

We were able to state that both men either had been or were currently in litigation against funds they claimed to have founded. We also found two companies associated with the men that they had not put on either their resumes or on their personal LinkedIn pages. In addition to questions about the fund’s investment strategy, our client was able to have a much more informed conversation with the men about their relationships with colleagues, as well as having the option to contact former colleagues we identified and located.

Our bill was $4,800.

As in any background investigation, we needed to take a “blank slate” approach to looking at the two men. In addition to a nationwide search of litigation involving them – done online – we sent retrievers to several courthouses in counties in which the two had lived and worked over the past 15 years. There is usually no substitute for on-site investigation when it comes to getting documents. It’s not enough to identify litigation – you have to retrieve it, read it and make sense of how it relates to a person’s history, trustworthiness, and whether it changes anything the person has presented about himself.

Several of the cases were complex, with docket entries in the hundreds and thousands of pages of litigation we could have retrieved. Yet, with a tight budget we knew that was not practical. We used a phased approach, choosing only the documents we thought would be the most useful to our client instead of dumping thousands of dollars of motion practice records that would not have told us anything about the two managers. It would have been easier for us to ask for the whole file, but our client would have resisted and instead we could have risked not asking for any of the case.

By knowing where to look, we saved time and money and were able to deliver an actionable report on budget.