Private investigation isn't just for criminal law — it's how plaintiff attorneys win before they ever file. Caleb Miller hosts Mike Thompson, founder of Ideal Intel, a Texas-based investigation firm. A former Liverpool police officer turned surveillance specialist, Mike now works exclusively with plaintiff law firms on personal injury and wrongful death cases. The conversation covers evidence preservation windows — video footage disappears after 30 days — and Mike's "discovery before discovery" approach. A background check on a truck driver in a death case exposed incomplete employment records and a dishonorable discharge the company didn't know about. Mike identifies where lawyers most commonly fall short: reactive fact-finding and failing to vet witnesses and experts.

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☑️ Charla Aldous, Caleb Miller, Eleanor Aldous

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More likely than not that 0.01% is all it takes to tip the scales of justice. Join us as inner circle legend, Charla Aldous, Eleanor Aldous and Caleb Miller walk you through the critical moments, big decisions and bold strategies that win high stakes cases and show you how to turn that 0.01% into a game-changing verdict. You're listening to the podcast where winning is more likely than not, produced and powered by LawPods.

Welcome to another episode of More Likely Than Not. Today we're joined by a good friend of ours, Mike Thompson. Mike has his own investigation company. It's called Ideal Intel, and today's going to be a fun episode. So welcome, Mike.

Yeah, thanks, Caleb. I appreciate you having me on.

Yeah, so basically we've been using Mike a lot and we've used him over, I would say, the last five to seven years on a lot of our biggest cases. And we have two or three cases right now where Mike's been helping us a ton on our pre-suit investigations and it's really, I would say, changed the nature of the case. In some of these cases, we ask him to do one thing and then he'll call us and say, "Hey, I think if you did X, Y, and Z, that would really help." And so a light bulb went off and we said, "Hey, we need to have you on the show because you have a lot of information that I think a lot of attorneys need to hear about how simple things can really add value." And so today, Mike's going to talk about how to make sure your early evidence is preserved in a case, how to uncover evidence that's out there, and then finally how you can use investigation services to add value to your case.

And so before we go further in the episode, Mike, can you just introduce yourself and tell the listeners a little bit about how you got started in investigations and what led you to starting your own company?

Yeah, sure. So my name's Mike Thompson. As you can tell from my accent, I am not a local Texan. I'm originally from Liverpool in the UK, Home of the Beatles and probably one of the best soccer teams in the world, in my opinion. Yeah, Liverpool was home for 30 years. Before I moved here, I was actually a police officer over there and I was a patrol officer for the most part, which is responding to emergency calls and having all that variety of crime and such like. And I really enjoyed the investigative part of it where I got to help victims essentially. It was 90% of the people you deal with in the police are not necessarily true victims, the regular people that come through the system, I would say. But the 10% that you dealt with that were legit victims were kind of where I found my grounding in the system and I enjoyed helping them and getting them through the process.

And then after a little while before I moved to the US because I was planning my move and I had to come out of the evidence chain because obviously courts moved slowly, right? So they took me out of the evidence chain and put me on a surveillance team. We were dealing with the prolific offenders at that point. So that's where I kind of learned a lot of the undercover skills and surveillance and tactics that go with that. We were monitoring essentially the top 10% of criminals in Liverpool that commit 90% of the crime. And it was just a proces of gathering various different pieces of intelligence to either place them at a scene of a crime or exclude them from a scene of a crime. So you would say if burglary happened, for example, and they went, even though they're prolific, you would know that that wasn't one of theirs, it was someone else.

And that's where I kind of finished out my police career. We moved over to the US, started in New York and wasn't really sure what I was going to do with myself because I was taking a career break really. I was planning on going home and I fell in love with the US and I'd gotten myself a job at Bloomingdale's of all places. I was working with their internal investigations team because I mean, some of their products is phenomenally expensive and a lot of their loss was caused by internal theft. And so I was brought in to teach how to conduct investigations internally, how to do some of the surveillance. And over time I noticed that there was some gaps in their training, gaps in the process and I started developing some things for them and got a really unique opportunity to move over to the Macy's side of the business.

Macy's was like the parent company and they wanted me to essentially travel all over the US go into the high risk locations where they had high theft, high loss and teach mainly three different things. It was how to do investigations without profiling and then public affairs type stuff like how to keep them from being sued. So I traveled all over the US doing that for a couple of years, probably until about 2019 I think. And during that time I found Texas and my wife and I had decided we wanted to live here. I came to Texas to meet my future father-in-law and I literally said to my wife the day I got here, I was like, "I think I was born in the wrong place." I fell in love with Texas immediately and we made strong efforts to move here right after that. And so we've been full-time in Texas since 2019, a more established investigations firm here in Dallas for a little while, for a couple of years actually, and learned more about the PI world, the private investigation world, because I've done obviously public sector and corporate and got to know a lot about the different nuances of the legal system here in Texas and the type of work essentially that I really wanted to do, which is what led me to setting up my own firm recently.

And I think what I've done over the years is gone back and forth from being kind of like victim facing to administrative. And each time I get drawn back to really wanting to do the work. And I think what happened is I started to become more, again, a back office, not customer facing so much and I really wanted to get back to doing the real work. So opening my own company recently and getting to focus on the things that I really want to do and getting more involved in actually doing the investigative work, it's kind of got me back to the things I'm passionate about.

Back to your roots.

Yeah. It's a lot of fun. I always say I like poking around in other people's business and it's not the same when you're just doing paperwork all the time. It's like problem solving.

Yeah. I mean, I think that relates to why we do what we do too. I love interacting with clients. I like getting to know the people I work with and I like, at the end of the day, knowing what the result was and that I helped somebody in some small way and I think yours is the same, but so tell the listeners what it is that ideal Intel is doing now and how you're working with law firms.

Yeah, sure. So I like to focus on things like plaintiff's cases versus defense. I prefer the plaintiff work because it feels more meaningful to me. And I like doing the initial consult with the lawyers because they usually have an idea of more about things like what the case is worth to the client and to them and what their end goal is. And I like being able to help build a plan around the information that can help get them there. It's always good if you can do it early. I think that being able to build that plan early and avoid a lot of evidence contamination is kind of where I see a lot of value in it. I typically would do, I would say civil, not just personal injury. I do a lot of work in the civil world. I do criminal as well. I always lean towards the person who's got a lot at stake versus the large organization that's going after them.

We need all the help we can get on this side of things. I want to focus more on the civil personal injury side because I think most of the people listening to our podcasts probably have that background. And I think too, on the bigger cases, people do think about using private investigators from time to time, but I would say it's not something people do on every case and I think there's still an old idea that this is more for criminal law than civil. And so what I want to do today is I want to focus on some of the things you do and you've done for us on personal injury cases and talk more about that. So for those who have never hired a private investigator on a case, say you have a potentially valuable wrongful death case or something like that, what's the process they go through to hire you and then tell us the sort of things you normally do on that sort of case?

Sure. So I would typically do a consultation like most attorneys would, and we usually do that for free so that we can make an assessment on whether it's something we can help with or not. I usually want to get a good outline of the circumstances and what evidence you've already been provided because then that shows me where there's potential gap in information or where you might have a lack of cooperation from various entities. I think about like the Department of Transportation or police departments are not always the most helpful when it comes to releasing information. So it's like, how are we going to tackle those problems? And then I think about mapping out a plan for things like witnesses, scene visits, trying to recover things like video footage. There's a lot of rules around video footage in particular, but most private business are going to, after 30 days, your video footage is gone.

Unless it's a regulated industry that's got a retention requirement, you're not necessarily going to get those things. So I like being able to see those things and prioritize like what are the things we need to start with? Because video footage, sure, if you don't get that within the 30 days, you're probably going to expect that it's gone. I mean, it doesn't mean you can't go and act because someone might be an anomaly and they might just be paranoid or whatever and they retain everything that they can. But knowing that after 30 days, your window is closing fast on that one. Witnesses are the same too. You think about the contamination of evidence with witnesses. I mean, you could have a motor vehicle accident on highway, for example, and you've got three or four good witnesses that see it and then they see a Facebook post and then they read all of the comments on the Facebook posts and the social media and now their perception of that event has changed and their evidence is potentially contaminated.

So getting to them early as well is really important. The longer you leave it, obviously memory is not permanent.

Yeah, no, that's true. I was thinking about the ways we've used lately on some cases and I think that we're different. So I've changed the way I view I think pre-suit investigations a little bit. It's my theory and I might be wrong on this, but my theory is that the more you have at the beginning of the case, as soon as you file it, you send information your disclosures, they're going to know you're prepared, they're going to know you're serious and I think adjusters and defense lawyers will value the case higher. So it's my theory that not just I don't want a witness affidavit just because I'm worried it's going to change, which I am worried about it'll change later. Or the witness is going to be hard to track down later if they move, get a different job or change their number, whatever it is.

I'm also now concerned with how I guess the adjuster is reporting it or how the attorney is reporting it initially. And so my theory is the more information like witness affidavits or maybe video or body cam background checks, anything you can do and get, and then the second you have to file your disclosures, you send all that to the other side. I think you're starting out way ahead and that's I think how I've started to use you a litle bit different too. It's not just the things I'm worried about not being preserved, but I also think it's the things that give us a massive advantage when we're plaintiffs and we can time when we file our lawsuit. The way I view it is basically you're doing discovery before discovery.

Yeah. I mean, it's a good way to look at it. You're trying to get ahead of whatever the counter argument's going to be, right? So you're trying to be more prepared. I think that being reactive in any kind of investigation, I always find that to be the worst tactic. You're always behind the eight ball. If you can look at some of the evidence, I mean, straight away again with a car accident, straight away you're presented with quite a lot of information in the outset that can be explored just from the officer's crash report. So there's a lot of evidence there that can be collected immediately, but oftentimes people don't necessarily think to file a suit early or they don't think to engage with an attorney early that you start to deteriorate that evidence. I think that the importance of being proactive early on is critical and it's like discovery review is one thing, but you're kind of getting what they want you to have.

Yeah, totally. And when you've got someone kind of working for you in advance of that, you're also getting the things that they might not want you to hear.

I'm thinking of an example specifically. So you worked on a case for us, and it was like two years ago, it was a really, really big death case involving a truck driver and I can't say anything more about it. But basically we entered into an informal discovery process before suit because it was a pretty straightforward case and everybody knew on both sides that it was going to settle. And there's really no reason to file this case because there's video of what happened and it's from a big trucking company. But anyway, so we go into this informal discovery process and we get sent all of this information from the employee file and then we say, "Hey, Mike, we have a feeling there may be some things missing here. Can you do your own background check on the driver and se what you find?" And well, lo and behold, a lot of the information we were given was not accurate.

I think arrest records weren't in there. This particular person was used for advertising for the truck company that they supported veterans. Turns out they were dishonorably discharged from the military, something the company didn't even know because they didn't do the right background checks. And so that's an example of you get into, it doesn't have to be informal, even the discovery process and you're basically just having to trust that the other side is giving you everything out there. But if you do an independent investigation on your own, I mean, there's a lot of databases out there that I didn't know people like you have access to, I mean, aside from just driving records.

Yeah. I think that any party in the case really there's a real advantage to using a private investigator on any party in the case, whether that's a witness, a driver, like an expert, I think it's super important to vet them because when you think about employment background checks, a lot of companies do not, and I'm not going to say that they're not very good. They're done to a standard that's expected to allow people to gain employment and not have to disclose things that may have been expired and such like, but on the face of it, they're fairly superficial. So when you've got a very serious accident or a very serious death, well, obviously it's serious if it's a death, but when you've got some kind of incident like that and you've got a big case in front of you, you should vet them all out.

I mean, even your witnesses, because think about a witness that you put on the stand who is an eyewitness who might've seen exactly what happened, but they've got all kinds of convictions for alcohol and drug abuse and dishonesty and things like that. I mean, it's very easy for an opposition lawyer to kind of attack their credibility, but you can use that to your advantage too. If you've got someone that doesn't really work in your favor, it's like, well, let's have a look. Is there anything there that we can use that really gives us that tactical advantage in the courtroom? Experts, I can tell you I've vetted plenty of experts that turn out when you run their background, you run their licensing, you find licensing issues, complaints, sanctions from their various professional organizations. Sometimes they can be very relevant to the testimony that they're giving in your case.

It could be sometimes very specific about the actual type of testimony that they're gving. So they've been sanctioned for that very specific thing in the past and it's like, "Well, you lied on this before. Why aren't you lying today?" So having that in hand can be super valuable and we have a lot of tricks to find that stuff. And when I say tricks, I mean, it's experience. It's not like we're not doing anything outside of the rules. We know the rules, like a good private investigator, whether it's me or someone else, they should be licensed following the rules and doing things the right way so that they can put you in the best position to win your case.

I'm trying to think of other ways y'all have helped us on these cases. Obviously you've vetted a lot of defendants for us, a lot of witnesses for us over the years. You've gotten witness affidavits, pre-suit for me just recently, a lot of them that I needed for a particular case. You've gotten stuff like that. You've gone out to scenes. I had you on one case just basically show up early in the morning or have somebody with you do that and just watch an intersection because I had a feeling that there was a lot of people crossing in areas that you're not supposed to cross and I know the defense is going to be like, "Well, they crossed without a crosswalk." Well, it turns out there's no crosswalks, there's no traffic signals, there's no other way in this particular intersection to get across the street. And I wouldn't have known that, but having y'all out there videotaping it.

I know you've definitely gotten surveillance video from businesses from us. There have been times you've gotten cell phone recordings of an incident or whatever, lots of stuff like that. I'm thinking of the cases, maybe some things that people wouldn't realize like Dram Shop cases in particular I think are super valuable because you need the surveillance video for one. They're going to be saying, "Oh, I didn't see any signs that somebody was intoxicated." But the other part is what I'm finding is it's really hard when you're dealing with the police department to get the information that you need. We had one case that y'all helped us out, I don't know, a couple years ago maybe and there was the police department was the only, there's a detective who had spoken to the drunk driver and we had no information to figure out where this guy had been drinking at all.

He had a criminal defense lawyer. They went and talked to us trying to open records requests, not getting anything. Turns out there's no surveillance video because by the time we got involved, it was after 30 days it had recorded over and we kept calling the detective and the police department, they've never call us back. And so Mike, I think it was you or somebody you were working with at the time, somebody happened to know the detective and one call from y'all and you got all the information I needed, which was, "Oh yeah, the defendant driver said he was coming from this bar." He said he was here first and he was here second and this is when he left. And that was enough information for us to send our preservation letters to get a TABC investigation going, those sorts of things. And so I think there are some cases out there too that like a Dram Shop case that once the police department takes over, you're very, very limited on what you can do as a lawyer even if you get involved early on.

Because half the time, like I said, they're not telling you what bar they came from.

Yeah. I mean, if they've gotten some good advice, they're not talking to anyone. And then with the police department as well, they're always going to use their exceptions to the Public Information Act and such. So getting information ahead of time without really, and sometimes too late to send your preservation notice is difficult. I think in that case in particular, it wasn't so much that he knew the police officer, but sometimes as an investigator with law enforcement experience and such like my investigator at the time, he was also ex- law enforcement. There's kind of a camaraderie and a common language, I guess, when you're interacting with law enforcement agencies and sometimes they'll give you the little pieces of informal information or the little pieces of information that you really need for your case because they also want to see a good outcome to it as well, I'm sure they realize that at some point you're going to get that information and it's not going to change the outcome of their case.

So rather than giving it formally over to an attorney because that feels like they might have done something they shouldn't.

I feel like every time I talk to a detective on a case, they're always so reluctant to give me information. I'm like, "I promise you you can do this. " But I had another one the other day and I just needed to know that the defendant was not coming from an establishment. I figured based on the time of day and where it happened, they weren't. I was like, "I cannot settle this case without knowing that there's not a dram shop angle out there." I wouldn't feel right about it. And I called the detective and the detective's like, "I can't tell you that information." I was like,

"I can neither deny or confirm."

Yeah, basically. And I'm like, "Look, I know you don't want to talk to me. I know you're nervous you're going to say something you don't want to say. Can you just tell me it was not an establishment?" And he finally was like, "It wasn't an establishment. All right, bye." But I feel like though maybe it is, you're right, the camaraderie that a lot of investigators have and I think prior law enforcement experience, they're more willing to open it up to y'all and they don't feel like, "Oh, they're going to record me or they're going to say something I didn't say or imply it. " They're able to feel more comfortable giving you the information. And I feel like sometimes I can make the same call and not have the same result. And so it's worth it for me to hire somebody like you to come in and just have the peace of mind that this law enforcement officer is going to feel more comfortable with you.

And it's also how you ask as well, them understanding that you have that common experience, you kind of know their limits on what they can and can't say. So by squeezing them into that narrow area of the conversation, you can usually get a good result from it. Not always. I mean, there's always going to be someone like that guy that says, "Nope, not telling you anything."

He was nice though, so I can't complain. I was like, "Come on man, give me something here." I also feel like sometimes with witnesses too, witnesses have a bad perception of lawyers. They don't want to talk to lawyers. They feel like, "Oh, if I talk to a lawyer, they're going to want to take my deposition. Maybe I didn't do something I should have done. And I feel like certain witnesses I can tell ahead of time that it's going to be better with y'all." And so I've had great results with y'all tracking people down and going to their houses or calling them and them being more willing to talk to you than they would from us. And then same thing with getting affidavits sometimes. I feel like they're worried a lawyer's going to change it to fit a narrative and less worried about that with you.

So I've been totally comfortable in certain situations with having you guys go out there and be the ones who are taking the witness statements and then getting the affidavits and having all witness communication. The other part of that too is if I sit down and I have a deposition with the witness and the other side says, "Have you ever spoken to the lawyer before?" They can legitimately say they have not. They haven't met me. And so it feels more credible as well that I know I'm using a third party to help.

Yeah, it creates a separation from you. The thing with witnesses in these cases is oftentimes it's the time that it takes to track down a witness and get them to talk, which is sometimes when you think about the value of the case and what you guys are trying to achieve, is it better to engage an investigator who that's what they do for a living versus you trying to do it when it's not really your niche and you also probably bill a lot higher.

I bill zero contingency work, but yeah, no, I know what you're saying.

At the end of the day, there's a time element that goes with it. I love tracking people down, by the way. It's one of my favorite things to do. I love the problem solving of it and the human elements as well, like how people give themselves away, being able to track them down. But you could try to talk to ... I would say sometimes to get five witness affidavits, I could have to speak to 90 people. That's not unusual. I might not even speak to 90 people. I might just leave 90 voicemails, but I might leave 90 voicemails, 10 call me back, five tell me to kick rocks and then five say, "Hey, I can help you on there." And then in some circumstances they even can continue to communicate with me like, "Hey, I've got some more intel on this one for you. " And they're great.

They're the type of witnesses that you really want on your case and especially if someone's been particularly wronged and there's certainly an empathy from witnesses when someone's been killed. And so I think you find more cooperation with witnesses in that area than others, but there's always going to be a roadblock to the courtroom aspect of it because people are nervous. Then it's not their wheelhouse, it's not their experience. Maybe their experience has been a bad one, maybe they have a criminal record and they don't want to spend any time in a courtroom. So being able to figure out how do you manage those witness expectations for you without making them any promises because if I say to them, "Hey, well, you're not going to end up in the courtroom." And the next thing you're like, "Well, I need them in the courtroom." And it can leave bad taste for you.

That's why, and we're going to shift here. I want to ask you about this question, timing of getting involved in cases, because for me, obviously it's everybody's preference to get hired on a case as soon as possible, because if you can go out there and the scene looks the same, if it's a truck collision or whatever it is, you can go out, get your reconstructionist out there, they can take pictures, they can maybe do vehicle downloads before any things change or surveillance video. Obviously, there's a huge strategic advantage to being hired early on. But the other part of that to me is when you go out there and you're talking to witnesses, you can say a lawsuit hasn't been filed. There's no lawsuit, we're just investigating this. And I think there's an advantage to getting people to open up when you're able to say that as well.

Or when you're out at a scene, someone's, "What are you doing out here?" I'm investigating an incident. And you don't have to say, "I'm invested or there's a lawsuit. Oh, actually you're the one who's been sued." They may not think twice about it, but I do think if a case has been filed already, now you have an investigator, they're talking to witnesses and that person says, "Well, what is this for? " Now you have to say it's for a lawsuit. And now they're thinking, "Oh, I'm going to get to post." So I have a preference for doing it as early as possible because I do think witnesses are more willing to share information. They're not as nervous and you have an ability to get more done in my opinion. But I want to talk to you about your opinions on timing.

Yeah. So I would say I would agree with you on early. The earliest you can get me in on a case, the easier it is, more efficient it is for me to get good evidence, not just evidence, but good evidence. So I mean, I think about the recent one I was working on with you guys where you had me, I was like, "Hey, I drive down that road every day and I have a dash cam. Let me see if I've captured that because if you'd have asked me a week later, I wouldn't have had any footage of it. " But just bringing it up in the moment and I was like, "Oh, I probably have that footage." And I mean, it happened that I had some footage, not really quite what you wanted because-

The scene changed in an hour after this happened.

Yeah, the scene changed pretty quickly on that one, didn't it? But I did go back because I do commute and I save all of my dash cam footage. When I'm working a case, I save it all. And so I knew that prior to that event, I'd also had some footage. I checked that too, but it hadn't quite captured it either.

I think we missed it by like a week maybe.

Yeah, I think so. But hiring an investigator early and I think the pre-suit piece that you talk about is also super valuable. I think about a recent premises liability case that I was working on and I was canvasing for witnesses. Someone complained, because it was in an apartment complex, someone complained to the management company, management company complained to the lawyers. There is a suit filed on that one. Lawyers getting an ear bashing about having someone contacting their client, even though that wasn't really what was happening. I was publicly accessible area, there's no trespassing issues, there was all of that, but it just create a discomfort for everybody that doesn't need to be there. Had I been doing that p- suit, they probably could have said to me, "Hey, we can't have you knocking on people's doors here," but there's nothing beyond that. There's no lawyers getting poking the eye on it because there's no lawyers involved in this at this point.

They don't have that process set up yet. So I go back, I mean, I'll bang on about witnesses all day long, but early allows you to assess the scene if the weather ... I think the weather here in Texas, imagine you've got a really good scene and one of those thunderstorms comes through and just washes away all your evidence. Yeah.

It's always something I'm worried about.

I mean, it happens all the time and you might get a week to assess that scene and it's photograph things like tire marks and debris and road condition and things like that, but then you have one of those storms come through and it just completely changes that roadway. So if you can gather those things early, witness counts, they deteriorate over time. I've already mentioned that, but they don't just deteriorate. They get contaminated and they get contaminated with all kinds of different things. So whether that be they talked to someone else in the car that was with them and now they've cross-contaminated their story, they read social media, they watch the media. And I have a couple of cases like that at the moment that when I read the witness statements and the key pieces are consistent, but there's so many deviations from the main story that are like, there's no way.

I always think that when you hear the ... I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment. There's a Netflix show right now and it was called The Crash. I don't know whether you've watched it.

I've watched ... Is there a couple episodes of it, right? It's like a teenager who has a boyfriend and yeah, I watched some of it. I never finished it though.

Right. Well, there's a couple of episodes, but one of them is focused on that incident and there's a witness in there that she's recalling after the fact and I think it's a really good example of this type of contamination. And she says she makes a quote. It's something about killing her boyfriend, but it's like a convenient quote and it's like, there's no way that that was really said. You've kind of pieced that into your story. In the same series, the second episode, the quote I do remember is the guy goes, "Oh, you're going to sleep well tonight." And it was about a murder. It's like, there's no way someone is going to make that statement. It's not normal, but it shows that the contamination comes after the media gets involved and they start saying, "Well, this happened, this happened, and speculation comes in. " And your biggest enemy in your world in the personal injury world is social media for that.

I think of an example, I've had a case, this was before I was here at all this law, but I was working on a case and I didn't send this case. It was there at the firm I was with and it was a sexual assault case and they were going after the employer and sexual assault is a crime, so it's something that is a vicarious liability thing. You can't be held vicariously liable. So you have to find something the employer did that was directly negligent and with this type of situation was one of their employees so you basically have to prove that they had noticed that this guy was a problem or he had done something in the past or whatever it is. And so I thought for sure this is a losing case, I have no way to prove this. So I just started to call prior employees who no longer worked with the company and I called and I deposed a number of them and I was getting nowhere and the last person I deposed was like, "Oh yeah, this guy used to harass this female who worked here years ago." So I call her and over the phone she's telling me, "Oh yeah, he was a pervert.

He was doing all these things. He was saying all these things." Yeah, totally. And I didn't get an affidavit, I didn't get a recording and I go and I depose her and when I depose her, the story is entirely different And this was one of those things finally at the end I just kept pushing and I was like, didn't you tell me this over the phone finally? Well, yeah, but ... And then it was changing the story. And I just think back, that's a situation I would've wished I could have spoken to her early and gotten an affidavit. Because once you have it in writing and you have them sign it, there's no changing their story.

And for us as investigators, 99% of the time, certainly in Texas, most of our interactions are recorded, especially with witnesses. I do it partially for that reason. If they decide to change their story, you have the audio recording. It's like, well, I didn't not hear this. This is what was said. But the other part is sometimes you have to protect yourself from malicious allegations too. When you have an opposing party that says, "Hey, your investigator came and did something wrong." A good professional is going to be making sure that they're protecting themselves as well in those circumstances. And that helps protect your case too.

I was thinking one time on a case actually you helped us with quite a while ago, we got produced a number of audio recordings from an investigator and I think that's an example of when recording may not be your friend because this guy was on the phone and it was supposed to be a neutral investigator just trying to help one of the defendants or two of the defendants just get information and he's telling witnesses, "Well, hey, these guys have sued us. They're suing us for a lot of money. We haven't been able to verify any of it, but you know how these things are. Sometimes they see an opportunity, maybe it's their chance to get rich. But anyway, let me ask you. " And it was like after he gave his opinion for two minutes and basically just had the guy agree with him, now they send you something that was like, "Oh yeah, this guy agreed he never saw anything." Got the recordings and that was one of the times I'm like, "Yeah, I probably wish this he wasn't recorded."

I often think about the bias in the investigative world because you get asked about that a lot in the field by witnesses and they'll say, "Well, you're working for these guys. I don't know whether I want to help them." Or they think that you have a bias based on who your client is. And I heard a Texas Ranger actually recently say, he says, "I investigate facts, facts lead to conclusions. I'm not really interested in the nuances around that. " It's like, "Oh, the opinions." He's like, "I investigate for facts and the facts are going to lead to my conclusion." And I think that good investigators are going to follow that anyway. They might not have that phrase that they use with witnesses all of the time. I heard he was using it a lot. I often have to reassure clients that it doesn't really matter who I work for, the facts are the facts.

So if you're giving me information that is a fact that's relevant to this case, that's important and it might not be always the most helpful piece of information to you, but then you at least have it and you know how you're going to use that in your case.

I think there's no perfect case either. That's the thing is like you said earlier, some of these witnesses that you really need in a case, you can't predict what background they might have. That doesn't mean they're less credible. But yeah, I mean, you've done investigations for us where all we have is names and numbers of people. We don't know what they're going to say and one of them's really good and one of them's not so good. Well, I'm glad I found that out earlier because then it's like if you go into a case and you think you have a slam dunk case and then two years later the defense deposes a witness who says something different, now you're not prepared. And so yeah, you just never know what these things, but I think having the information is always more helpful than not having it. And I wouldn't want an investigator to try to sugarcoat anything or want to tell me something different about the case that's not true or have a witness later saying, "That's not what I told him." Or you find a recording that someone's trying to influence a witness.

And so for me, early on on a case, I just want the facts because our job is to take what the facts are and then basically see how those fit into our framework to support our clients. And so I think y'all's job is to be neutral on that and just give the information.

It's super important. And I go back to the witnesses that I was with that ranger in particular, but I was reading through the witness statements and as much as the facts lead to conclusions in that particular case, there's definitely some bias in their outcome. But the witness statements ultimately, I think they will show where the bias exists and the good people, people who are smart, sensible, and can process information will look at that and go, "Okay, I can see what the truth is here based on the account."

Yeah. A lot of the information that comes out in some of these witness statements is really not super important to what happened either. We had a case where you gave us a witness statement recently and it was like, okay, the first 50% of the witness statement supports exactly what happened, the negligence, everything else. Now the other 50% was not really helpful, not good for us, but it wasn't like case determinative at all. And so part of that too is just sifting through the information that matters to your case and information that doesn't. And sometimes a lot of times when you're talking to witnesses and you're getting statements, you have to listen to their whole story and 10% may only be relevant to why you need it. But let's move on. I want to ask you a question that I'm really curious about. So for all the lawyers out there, what are some things you see lawyers not doing correctly on cases when it comes to investigations or things, opportunities that may be missed for folks have they hired you on a case?

So I think that there's a couple of places where I would say not being proactive with their fact finding and being reactive, that's where I see probably the biggest opportunity for lawyers and it's where it kind of catch them in the hot water, maybe not even hot water. It just catches them off guard and they're not prepared for whatever's coming back at them over the table. Oftentimes I find that because they're trying to manage that cost benefit and it's like trying to keep it low cost and prevent you from being proactive sometimes. By being proactive, I think like you've said in the beginning of this today, it's like it can lead to you having a much more effective case, higher value case. So sometimes you do need to put that investment a little bit. It can be a small investment to be proactive, but that's where I see probably the biggest opportunity for attorneys.

And then the other one would be witness vetting and expert vetting. I think they kind of rely on the resume of the expert and there's an expert on both sides and they're going to go head to head in the courtroom, but they don't think about, well, let's just check the credentials and make sure that they're all up to date or is there anything that you wouldn't put on a resume? Or even with the witnesses the same, it's like if you've got a recent drum shop case or a drunk driver that's killed someone and you're going to put a witness on the stand or there's a witness there who's just got a recent DUI, I don't know, there might be some questions there. So I just think that proactivity, bringing the investigator in early and just spending a little bit on due diligence and vetting out case and seeing where those other lines of inquiry are, doesn't hurt to have a second opinion.

I mean, I know you said not all cases are perfect. They all have something that's not perfect about them. I know a lot of the cases are also similar. So sometimes people fall into a routine and go, "This is just routine." And I think that's where you kind of get caught out. It's like, "Dang, I wish I'd done that ahead of time."

Yeah, thankfully we tend to bring you guys in early, which is really helpful, but there have been cases too for sure in the past that maybe you get caught up in the thing that you think you already know the facts of the case really well and there's nothing really else to know. And then sure enough, and I can think of one case where the police officers cited the defendant for failing to yield the right of way. No other witnesses. They did a reconstruction, my reconstructionist agrees with me, that sort of thing and thought it was a close case. And it ended up working out fine. We got a good result and everything, so it's not an issue. But the defense found one witness I had no idea even existed, don't know how they found this witness, but that was something that I wish I would have hired an investigator to go out and make sure because I feel like this person didn't actually exist, but it would've been nice to have a second opinion and make sure that, hey, nobody was out there.

There's no 911 audio that anybody's mentioned, nothing in the records that maybe I didn't get. And so I do see that time to time. I would say though, what I see mostly when I talk to people I know is the cost. And so what I do sometimes for everyone out there, if I have a case and I'm not really sure what it is yet, maybe it's something I signed, I just want to investigate, don't really know if it's valuable yet because you may have the damages, but the liability may not be there. And I've had a couple cases recently where it's like, it's really good damages, I don't know where the liability is, I need to investigate this and kind of look into it. So I email Mike or text him, "Hey, this is what I'm looking at doing on this case. I'm not sure what it's worth yet.

Can you tell me what you think it'll cost to do these three things?" And so before I spend any money at all, Mike gets me a quote. And so now I can budget and I can say, "Can I spend $3,000 on this one thing?" And to me it's, well, if the information with the $3,000 turns this good damage case into a $5 million case, isn't the $3,000 worth it. If it doesn't, you would never know that otherwise. And so we spend money here sometimes not knowing what the result is because potentially we know it can make the difference in between a case that's not a case and a case that's very valuable. And so I would say, yeah, the money's always an issue with the sort of cases we do because we do contingency work. You always got to be smart. But it's been my experience that most things that Mike has done for our firm and the investigation are not as expensive as what you think they were.

And sometimes too, it's as simple as he can do an open records request to an organization that I never thought about asking information for. I'll do five open records requests and then there's two others that he says, "Hey, have you thought about this? " And that's free information because I spoke to him about the case. And there are things like that that pop up. But in my experience, yeah, I think people are a little bit scared to spend the money and I get it if you have a $100,000 case, spending $10,000 is less money for the client.

Yeah. And I think that sometimes with that you can, and I've done this with you guys plenty where you kind of stay a step at where it's like, let's look at these three pieces of information and we get that back and then go, oh, that's interesting. It's not quite where we want yet, but if we spend another couple of hours on it, there's three other lines of inquiry here that could solidify that case. So good investigators always going to work with you on budget. They know there's not an endless pot of money on these things and they want to help you and get to the outcome. And if there's nothing there, it's also good to know that early too, right? It's like instead of investing in the case that you think it is and then you find out very early on, it's like actually there's three witnesses here that kind of negate the whole thing.

So yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to that early engagement, but I mean, I'm always going to give a quote upfront, tell you what I think it would cost based on what you need. And I'll always give suggestions as well, "Have you thought about this? " And you might not be ready for that yet. I think we've had that conversation plenty too, right? And then I can think of a recent example where we were just looking at things like crash reports and I remember there was a driver on one of the crashes we were looking at and when I kind of went through, I think I was just fairly routine, but then I was like, these offenses are very similar because oftentimes in a car accident that's not fatal, the criminal implication is usually a citation, right? It's like, well, let's get these citations and just see really what's on the citation.

You find out that a bunch of those have been, they're actually connected to a collision. And then you're like, okay, well, let's get the collision reports. And then now you've got your liability because the company didn't do an adequate background check and they've got a driver that's got three collisions in the last year that they should have found. And that's very low cost.

Yeah. I would say some of the most helpful information I've gotten from y'all is not always witness statements and things like that. It's the information that's available online without ever having to leave an office that we don't know exists. I think like you say going back to why wouldn't you let somebody do what they're good at instead of trying to be an investigator? I mean, it's like everybody understands this now with AI. Clients come in now or potential clients, they tell you what their case is worth because ChatGPT told them and you're like, "You should probably just leave that to us." And I feel the same way it's we wear a lot of different hats as lawyers and especially those people who have their own firms.You're running a business, you're managing staff, you're working on case acquisition and at the same time, you're having to work up cases and how do you have time to put into every individual case what you need?

And so for me, sometimes the benefit is like you said, having another set of eyes and another brain who has more expertise to think about the things that we could be doing on a case. And like I said, a lot of times the information that's the most helpful is the stuff that if you're a member of that database, you can get it. And a lot of times us lawyers, we don't have access to certain databases and it's not very expensive. If you have an investigator run some of these database checks or just do open records requests, I mean, you can spend $1,000 and get some information that changes the nature of the case. And so I would say for those of you out there that haven't used an investigator as much on a case, you really need to consider doing it and you need to consider doing it early on.

Even if you don't end up hiring one, at least having a conversation with what possibilities exist on your case and things you probably haven't thought of is goal. It really does help. And before we end today, I do want to ask you a couple more questions. So there's one question I had in particular, which is, can you think of a case that you got brought in on where having an investigator literally save the case or change the whole nature of the case?

I mean, it happens quite often when people consider it. The one that springs to mind is more of a civil case than personal injury specifically. We were asked to do essentially a due diligence on an investment and I just think that the techniques are all the same. So it doesn't matter which case, whether you apply it to personal injury, whether you apply it to civil case, M&A or whatever. We were brought into vet a couple of individuals within a business transaction and it was a very high stakes business transaction. You're talking probably about $10 million on the table and they hadn't engaged early. They're almost at the point of signing the paperwork and the principal of this one business just says, "I just get a bad feeling about this guy." And so the lawyer's kind of scrambling and he's like, they want the deal to go through, the guy's getting ready to retire and take his payout.

But they asked us to look and looked at this guy and he was essentially, he'd set up a whole separate business on the side. He'd been meeting with all of the clients. He'd kind of set up in a way that when the sale went through, the client was essentially buying an empty shell instead of a fully operating business. And I think about like had they done that early all of the time that had been spent on that deal, they would've been able to identify that early because this guy not only had he done this on this occasion when you looked into his history, you found that he'd been sued twice before for doing the same thing to other people. I just think that there's plenty of cases like that, that you look at the evidence and that goes back to being reactive. It's like if you bring the private investigator in late, they can probably still help you maybe salvage something or get you a piece of information that you need or prevent you going down a path that you don't want.

But if you don't bring them in at all, that outcome, I mean, you just don't know what that outcome's going to be, right? I mean, you're kind of just leaving yourself out there just to kind of see what happens, I guess.

Another question I was thinking about when we were sitting here that we didn't talk to you about previously is just really interesting to me because I bet there's some crazy ones out there. What is the weirdest request you've ever had to help with private investigation services? And if it's not appropriate for the errand, maybe we can't say it, but I was just thinking, man, you must get some wild ones sometimes.

Yeah. We've had some wild, crazy requests. I think the one that always springs to mind, I always think about my wife, I had to get involved in this one and she was kind of, "What the hell?" And it was early in my career and I've been asked to basically, it was a family law case because they're always the ones with the weird requests, kind of messy. I'd been asked to do surveillance on a guy that was basically going to a swingers party somewhere in Texas. I was early in my career in this field and I was like, "How am I going to do that? How am I going to get ... " They wanted footage from inside the event. So how do I get a camera in an event like that? How do I do it without anybody noticing? How do you figure this out?

And it was just-

I want to just say for the audience who's not watching this video, Mike, you're like six six, six,

Seven,

With an accent, not

Exactly- I'm not discreet. Yeah. And so I went home to my wife that night, I don't know whether I can do this one. This is the weirdest job I've ever been asked to do. And then I was like, "Hang on a minute, but you want to come with me? " That didn't go down very well. Fortunately for me, the event was canceled actually so I didn't end up having to go do it and I was so relieved, but I just remember it's the one that sticks with me as the weirdest for sure. I don't think I've ever been so nervous my entire career and I've dealt with some bad criminals.

Yeah. I was going to say, I have a lot of other questions, but probably not good to stick on this topic on the air on a show for lawyers, but just had one other question we were talking about. So I asked you about what's one case you got involved in, where you think your work saved the case. There was another case you were telling me about where I said, "What's one case you could tell the listeners about where maybe they got you involved too late and there was a lot of damage done at that point?"

I'd gotten involved in this one. I think actually the lawyers might have got involved a little later in the course of the case itself. So maybe the investigator wasn't the priority at the time, but we'd been asked to go track down a witness that they were told to me as being cooperative, very cooperative, wants to help. And we talked to the guy and he literally said something to the effect of, "I don't know why you're calling me now. This was almost two years ago. I have nothing to say on it. You should have talked to me in the beginning." And I was kind of blown away by it because of the relationship that he had to the victim and the people in the case. And I was like, "Wow, that's a strong kind of rejection to the investigative process, which I never really experienced that.

" But when you really look at the facts of the case, he just felt it was clear from his conversation that he felt that we'd only reached out to contact him because now there was something at stake, like there was money on the table or whatever and people involved were not acting particularly empathetic to the victim because they'd created this delay. He felt like they should have spoken to him sooner. I don't think he realizes that his evidence was probably still helpful and would help that victim, but he was just really kind of rejecting the process at that point and it sucked because it could probably have been a turning point. And had someone gathered that evidence maybe and even in the first six months, he'd have probably been super cooperative. But at the two year point, I think he just felt he'd just been left hanging.

And I think that probably killed a lot of the value in the case, I would think, on that one.

Yeah. And those are hard situations because then if you try to depose a person and you issue a subpoena, another really angry with you and they're probably not going to be super helpful. So just again, another example of why if you have a valuable case or if you can afford to do so, bringing in an investigator early on is just so, so helpful. And half the time now, I feel like by the time I file my case or even before I do, I can send a pre-suit demand that has basically full discovery and full liability information that most people only get through discovery and through litigation. So just super, super helpful. If you have any questions at all for us on how we use investigators, feel free to reach out to us [email protected]. And then Mike, you practice or you run your firm all throughout Texas, right?

Yeah. I'm licensed in Texas and practice throughout. And I do have resources across the US and internationally as well depending on the need, but I like to focus in Texas.

And how can our listeners, if they want to use you, get ahold of you?

You can contact me on an email, [email protected]. I have a website with the same domain, so getidealintel.com, or you can give me a call 917-601-0125. That's my cell. I usually pick up unless I'm with a client. So I'm pretty prompt on that one. So if you have any questions on it, happy to, even if it's just talking you through some of the nuances of your case and maybe problem solving, I enjoy doing that as well, so happy to do it.

Well, awesome. Definitely try Mike. If you need somebody, just don't keep him too busy where I can't use them. Thanks for being on the show today. We'll see everybody next time.

I think you can tell, and we at all this law here, we actually kind of like each other and we absolutely love, love what we do and we work a lot of our cases up from the get- go, but we're brought in on cases a lot. We try cases all across the nation. If you have a case that you're interested in talking to us about, we'd love to hear from you. We've tried everything from trucking, workplace injuries, explosions and burn cases, dram shops, ride-share sexual assaults, birth injury, your personal injury cases. If you need a partner to help you with your case, please call us. We can be contacted at aldouslaw.com. We'd love to hear from you.

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