Reconstruct long-lost histories of people, companies, products and property

A number of our investigations are historical in nature, and we have built up substantial expertise in how and where public and private information is maintained archivally. For example, several of our environmental investigations have uncovered valuable nuggets in corporate archives and courthouses from as long ago as the 1920s and 1930s.

Recent assignments to unearth long-buried information (all needed in litigation) have included finding:

• A name used in old advertisements.
• Workers who cleaned up around a port facility.
• A defunct company whose products were being misremembered as our client's.
• A manual for operating an allegedly dangerous industrial machine.
• An automotive part involved in a patent dispute.

One of these cases was a dispute over who should bear the cost of cleaning up a polluted plot of land, which depended on who had owned and operated it during the early part of the twentieth century. None of the filed deeds, mortgages, building permits and other property documents went back far enough. But we found a detailed record book kept by an obscure local government agency that showed our client was not the operator at the crucial time—just the kind of evidence our client needed.

We have a lot of experience identifying the old-timers around an industry or town, and getting them to talk to us.