What D’ya Got
You’re Only as Good as Your Findings
Bill Simmons and his gang have yet to get to My Cousin Vinny on the Rewatchables, but in the meantime, I’m watching it as often as I can. Yes, I’m a sucker for a happy ending, and spoiler alert, when the prosecutor dismisses the charges, I cheer each time. The researcher in me also sees some great lessons in this movie. Of course, the best lesson is how from a set of tire tracks, Mona Lisa Vita destroys the state’s case. One line, however, always sticks with me. Having also figured out what the tire tracks mean, Vinny asks the sheriff to look something up on a police database. After a short hesitation, the sheriff agrees. A few minutes after Mona Lisa’s expert testimony, the sheriff enters the court room with a print-out. Vinny gets him on the stand and asks the three words most people ask me after I’ve done my research. What d’ya got?
You’re only as good as your findings. I tell people this all the time. Return a set of searches with findings, from mundane criminal convictions to spectacular instances of mob activity, the client is thrilled. You did a good job. It bugs the heck out of me that researchers are rated this way. I retort, you go to your doctor for a check-up. She’s says all’s well, great numbers. Do you object? Question the work? It’s not my fault you wanted to do business with someone absurdly clean. Or were they?
Put it this way. Everyone’s dirty until proven otherwise. Or take this other research truism. There’s no such thing as a unique name. In a recent matter, I was given a name, Joe Something. Something lived in Indiana. Indiana, like a lot of red states, is wonderfully generous with its public records. Indiana has robust and detailed statewide court records. I put Something’s name into the database. Boy I could have turned in a great report. The client would have loved it. All the records I found .
The Joe Something memorandum turned in did have a few findings. Joe had social media connections of interest. He had a public Venmo account, and a couple of transactions were noteworthy. There were no public records. It took maybe 30 minutes of futzing around to figure out that Indiana had at least two Joe Somethings. For some matters, most matters, it takes more than 30 minutes. I’d venture to say I spend more time not finding things than writing up the things that I find.
If you detect some ire on my part, it’s true. For the most part, research is parceled out and budgeted based on the amount of names to be researched. Here, I think I am doing one name, Joe Something, and really, it’s at least two names. It’s Joe, my Joe, and the other Joe. To determine if the findings are findings, I have to reverse engineer. The Joe with the stuff. Who is he. Where did he live, work. Who’s he married to. Middle initial. Job history. University? Then you got all that material, and you have to make sure none of it matches what you know about the person you’re being paid to research.
Sometimes things check out. Searches on a company based in the Palestinian territories started out interesting because the address of the company was in Israel and the owner Israeli but became much more interesting when initial queries led me to a US court case, where a person with the same name as the owner of the Palestinian company was a defendant in a fraud case. The PACER file provided background on this person. From a company name I could find an address. From an address I could find a spouse. When I found a Facebook page, it had the Israeli, I mean Palestinian company name as employer and the wife’s name as the wife’s name. I squared the circle. Yes, the case in the US was him.
What d’ya got. Sheriff Farley got back on the stand. Still under oath, he explained that he took it upon himself to, spoiler alert, look for a 1963 Pontiac Tempest involved in recent crimes, and yada yada, spoiler alert, suspect found with a gun matching the caliber used in Vinny’s case. Man, it made, makes for such a great movie. Right. In non-movie life, though, what d’ya got, is usually a lot of dry facts. Verifying and laying out without much metallic mint green. Except you never see what goes into giving you the nothing (or the something).