Scrutiny by Consumer and Rights Groups

When Ralph Nader helped kill the Corvair, he spawned a cottage industry of consumer activists dedicated to exposing corporate abuses.

You may need to know whether any of them have targeted—or are about to target—your prospective business partner. The challenge is to pick up any signals that such whistleblowing is about to take place.

After identifying the relevant groups in a particular industry, we often buy past issues of their newsletters. Over the past several years, sophisticated searching of the Internet has made this kind of risk assessment easier.