One system instead of folders, email and hope
The situation
A private investigations firm, led by a former big-tech global investigations lead, ran on manual open-source research: a stack of separate paid tools, hand-run searches, hand-built reports. The owner's own words about the tools he was evaluating: "Everything's a big word. You're not getting everything... what is it checking?" And nothing in the toolchain enforced the discipline that separates a finding from a guess.
What we did
We built an investigation operating system the investigator directs in plain English, like writing an email to an intern investigator. Under the hood: seven search engines queried in parallel, over 55 social-platform collectors, and domain, archive, and threat-intelligence lookups, all feeding one case file.
The collection is not the point. The discipline is:
- Nothing becomes a finding without two independent corroborating sources. Uncorroborated items are flagged, never silently dropped.
- A mandatory challenge step attacks every conclusion before it reaches the client, using structured analytic techniques from the intelligence community.
- Every piece of evidence is captured at collection time with a cryptographic hash and archive submission, so chain of custody holds.
- Reports generate as branded Word documents straight from the case file.
The number
39 numbered cases have run through the system. 288 chain-of-custody evidence items captured, each hashed and archived at collection time. 16 invoices shipped, themselves generated by a script from the same case records. The firm liked the case work enough to buy the system itself: a fixed-price deployment into their own environment is now underway.
Anonymized: the client has not yet approved being named. Every number is from the engagement record.
An investigator's tools should argue with them. If your team's work product depends on judgment nothing checks, the same discipline can be built into your process in a week. $1,000 fixed.
Start with one thing: $1,000, one weekMore work: the analyst that refuses to guess · the pipeline that failed 95 times silently · the research desk that runs itself