Identify an opponent's former employees and others at the intersection of may-be-knowledgeable and may-be-sympathetic

Former employees are at the core of many of our assignments because they can be the only way to learn what really happened at a company we've been asked to investigate.

Identifying who used to work where is a core competency of the Mintz Group, to which we devote significant resources and creativity.

For example, we find company-specific and industry-specific archives of online postings to message boards and search them with strings of search terms that succeed in identifying a company's former employees.

Another tactic that works: identifying obscure professional associations that list members by employer; ordering both the current and out-of-date editions of the member directory; then comparing the entries to show who dropped off. (Our bookshelves already contain many of these directories.)