Locating and Interviewing Hard to Find and Uncooperative Witnesses and Family

Mitigation work often involves opening up very old wounds.  Families do not like talking about abuse and dysfunction.  Many times your witness has some complicity in causing the very mitigating factor you are trying to prove.  How do you locate hard to find and uncooperative witnesses and family?  How do you get them to talk to you?

• This is where we combine art and science
• Knowing how to find people is a combination of knowing how to look for them, what records to search, how to coax information out of our resources and how to use that information to best use
• We find over 97% of the people we look for
• We find people where other investigators have long since given up
• Once found, the art of proper interviewing comes into play
• Cultural and ethnic issues are paramount as the slightest cultural faux pas can result in no cooperation at all
• Experience is the key to knowing how to phrase questions and obtain needed information
• Documenting the information is critical as, like a physician, our primary goal is to do our client no harm
• Success speaks for itself as we have successfully located and interviewed gang members hiding from arrest warrants
• We are successful because we are good

Don’t trust your critical interviews to an amateur.  We know what we are doing and we get it right the first time, which may be the only chance you get!