When Did The Betrayal Begin?

Investigators get hired because you can’t look everywhere, and one of our main skills is figuring out where to look and how far back the searches should go.

Most searches hit the same kinds of records, but an asset search is more interested in what a person has today. A background investigation to figure out what kind of corporate treasurer someone was ten years ago cares about records back then just as much.

The trick in divorce is that our clients sometimes think their spouse was trustworthy up to the point they announced they were leaving, or up to the point the client discovered her spouse had been lying for the previous year about where he was spending his business trips.

What we tell people in divorce is that you should assume the lies began several years before you know they did. This may not be true for any divorce, but we don’t get called into divorce mediations or collaborative divorces in which both spouses still trust and respect one another enough to avoid the courtroom.

But when the trust breaks down and we get called in, we say: “We need to go farther back in our searches, because someone who lied to you last year could have lied to you eight or ten years ago too.”

That is emotionally challenging for someone going through divorce. It’s bad enough when a trusted employee is found to have been embezzling funds over the course of two decades (the frequent patten in embezzlement). But the person you fell in love with and wanted to be married to for the rest of your life? Knowing they let you down is something many people have a lot of trouble processing.

Our firm works on large corporate issues in which hundreds of millions of dollars or more are a stake, but emotions never run higher than in family law matters.

Yet, as emotionally taxing as divorce is, a client seeking to search a spouse’s assets comes in with a decided advantage: Our clients in divorce usually know a lot more about their spouse than anyone else, at least when it comes to daily habits, close friends, and other bits of information that can inform our asset search.

What might a secretive husband name a secret company? Which lawyer would he have used to set it up? Who would be holding assets for him until the divorce is finalized? We’ve written about this in the Bloomberg Family Law Reporter, Your Client Knows More than She Thinks.

Other than the death of a loved one, a divorce can be the low point of your life. One divorce lawyer I’ve worked with said recently that she recommends that if her clients can afford it, they should get therapy as the divorce proceeds (she does high conflict divorces a lot).

As hard as a contested divorce may be though, know this: If you are looking for assets, take heart that you have a head start on the facts.