A Thought on Investigative Technologies

Posted on August 18th 2010, by Bruce Goslin

“What does K2 actually do?”

It’s a question I like to be asked, but one that is difficult to answer succinctly.

I often say that we gather information to help our clients make informed decisions about their business. That could cover anything from making an investment, to completing a transaction or even to launching a new product. I could talk about how the information to make a decision needs to be good, accurate, complete, reliable, and so on, but most people who ask already understand the basics of investigation.

What is more complex, and what challenges us daily, is managing all the information that we gather.

When I first started out in the business, we did not have the internet.

Gasp, I know.

While it may come as a shock to the younger generation of investigators, we didn’t just hop online when we used to start cases. In my early days, we didn’t even have computers. We had desktop word processors. The simple green glow of their screens was an upgrade for us, but even most ATM screens now are more complex.

For the most part, all you could do was type. We could do some limited media searches, there were corporate registries and libraries, a lot of paper indexes to review, all of which had been laboriously compiled by hand.

Fast forward to now and each of us now has access to huge volumes of information from an endless number of sources and perspectives. Just about everything and everybody is online somewhere, and the dynamic growth in the amount of information available only complicates things further.

Just about anything published now is instantly available online, and what has been published in the past is rapidly being scanned and uploaded. Soon enough the term “out of print” will mean the printer is off-line and little else.

Where analysts and case managers used to have to deal with a small trickle from computers, we are now dealing with a fire hose of information. We need to sort through it all, evaluate it, decide what is good, credible information, what the interests are behind the information, what the context is, when to keep looking and when to say “Stop, I have enough”. Information management is a major part of how we plan out our case load.

In the next couple of posts I will be exploring the information explosion and how we manage it. I’ll be discussing the problems and challenges we face, examining techniques and approaches that we are trying and pointing out some of the trends that we are seeing in the industry.

K2 Global Consulting: An Introduction

Posted on August 9th 2010, by Jeremy Kroll

I’m Jeremy Kroll, one of the founders of K2 Global Partners.

K2 is a start-up, or rather, a restart.  My father, Jules, spent the last 40 years creating the modern investigations industry.  I’ve been at it for over 15 years myself. Now Jules and I have partnered with two investigative superstars, Charlie Carr and Bruce Goslin, to create a new kind of investigations company:  one that’s lean, agile, and technologically ambitious.

The marketplace in which businesses operate today is vastly more complex and unpredictable than it was even a decade ago.  The risks we face, the capacity for fraud and corruption, and the vulnerability to corporate and personal reputations have grown exponentially as businesses expand their reach into new territories both geographic and technological.  We’ve established K2 Global to solve some of the most complex risks and business challenges our clients face as they seek new opportunities (or deal with persistent headaches) in a volatile and ever-changing marketplace.

The heart of our venture (Kroll 2.0 as my friends have dubbed it) remains the network of intelligence and investigative assets that we’ve cultivated over the years — but we are now much, much more.  To enhance our information gathering and analysis capabilities, we have recruited fantastically smart and creative professionals from the worlds of law, journalism, political risk, and technology and Web development to work alongside our more traditional investigative teams.

We are currently serving clients on every continent, in markets big and small.  K2 has regional headquarters in New York and London and satellite offices in Madrid and Bahrain.  We’re always in the hunt for more talent to join K2, so if you’re interested, be sure to send us a note.

In the coming months, we’ll be using this space to address new challenges facing corporations, governments and institutions, from digital privacy to clean/green tech fraud to new investigative techniques, tools and industry trends, and more.

We hope you’ll check in and let us know what you think.