How Can a Private Investigator Help with Trial Preparation in Colorado?

Private Investigators Get The Facts for Your Trial Preparation

Successful litigators in the Colorado courts know the reason behind positive trial outcomes: thorough trial preparation. Trial preparation means having a comprehensive understanding of the relevant law before writing a brief or entering a courtroom. But trial preparation also involves knowing all of the facts and gathering all the evidence that could impact a case. Those facts aren’t always obvious, and crucial evidence isn’t always easily obtainable.

Colorado attorneys consumed with trial preparation may not have the spare hours to uncover critical information. Lawyers may lack the resources needed to find key witnesses or expose misconduct by someone trying to game the system. While good lawyers know how to craft a persuasive argument and use Colorado law to their client’s advantage, they likely lack the technical expertise required to recover deleted emails or find hidden bank accounts.

Because of the lack of technical skills many Colorado trial lawyers hire private investigators to help them with trial preparation.

Private Investigators Bring Their Expertise to All Aspects of Trial Preparation

Preparing for a trial is a lengthy and multi-stage process. Getting ready for trial begins even before the filing of a lawsuit or the bringing of criminal charges. At every step in the trial preparation process, a Colorado private investigator can use their skills and experience to provide the attorney with an extra set of highly trained eyes and ears.

Private investigators in Colorado often come from law enforcement backgrounds, giving them insights into the most effective methods and techniques for gathering evidence. Highly analytical and meticulously detailed, private detectives can find and put together pieces of complex puzzles that most people can’t see.

Here are five ways that private investigators help Colorado attorneys position themselves for victory at trial:

Evidence Gathering

Attorneys don’t like surprises. The best criminal defense attorneys in Colorado want to know all the facts that could affect their case, good or bad. A private investigator can pursue all possible leads and follow facts to uncover additional evidence or testimony that can give the attorney a 360-degree view of the factual landscape.

Locating Witnesses

People who may know critical information or who saw relevant events don’t necessarily just show up at the attorney’s office and start talking. Some witnesses don’t want to get involved or may simply be hard to find. Through processes like skip tracing and scouring public records, private investigators can locate hard-to-find witnesses so the attorney can interview or subpoena them to testify.

Surveillance

You no doubt can picture a movie or TV show where a private investigator armed with a camera keeps their eye on someone’s movements and activities over several hours or many days.

In litigation, surveillance can expose infidelity relevant in a divorce case. It can capture a picture of a personal injury plaintiff or injured employee who claims they can barely walk helping their friend move a heavy couch up a flight of stairs. Catching a subject red-handed on video or in photos doing something that completely contradicts their claims in a lawsuit often brings that suit to a quick conclusion.

Collect and Review Electronic Evidence and Social Media Posts

Email accounts, computer files, and social media accounts are a mother lode of information for private investigators. They can scan, collect, archive, and monitor thousands of photos and posts across social media. Sometimes, all it takes is one thoughtless picture, one ill-advised comment, or a friend’s careless post to undermine a party’s entire case.

Importantly, private investigators understand what many people still refuse to believe: deleting an email, post, or their browser search history doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. Similarly, keeping accounts like Facebook or Instagram “private” won’t prevent others from seeing what they contain.

The proprietary techniques and technology that exceptional private investigators use allow them to restore complete Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, including supposedly deleted posts.

Finding Hidden Assets and Accounts

In many Colorado divorce proceedings, cases involving employee embezzlement, or other matters related to financial fraud, wrongdoers often go to great lengths to conceal assets. So do defendants who want to shield their assets from creditors or victorious plaintiffs. From setting up hidden accounts to establishing shell companies to complex multi-layered transactions, there’s no shortage of ways to hide the ball.

Private investigators can dive deep into a person’s finances and uncover investments, flagrant spending, and anything else involving the movement or concealment of money. They also have access to a variety of restricted proprietary databases that contain valuable intelligence that they can use to locate financial assets domestically and abroad.

Trial Preparation With the Help of a Private Investigator Can Be The Key to Victory

If you are an attorney looking for a competitive advantage as you prepare for trial, BrightStar Investigations can provide it. Our private detectives regularly work with Colorado’s top trial lawyers and understand what they need for success.