Insights
Field-tested perspective.
Practical analysis on due diligence, cross-border verification, fraud investigation, and the decisions where the cost of being wrong is highest — written by the team that does the work.
Litigation Support
What an Investigator Does for a Court-Appointed Receiver
Where an investigator fits in a receivership: what the appointment order allows, how assets and transfers are traced lawfully, and how findings are kept usable for the receiver, counsel and the court.
Insurance Investigations
Insurance SIU Support: When Carriers and TPAs Bring In an Outside Investigator
What an independent investigator adds to a carrier's special investigation unit: the five situations that call for one, what it delivers on subrogation, workers' compensation and complex commercial losses, how referrals sit with the carrier's own duties, and what it never decides.
Corporate Investigations
Trade Secret Theft Investigation: When a Departing Employee May Have Taken the Files
When a departing employee may have taken confidential information, the first days decide what can be proved. What to preserve, what an independent investigation can lawfully establish, where it stops, and how its findings feed counsel's next move.
Due Diligence
Red Flags in Due Diligence: What an Investigation Can Surface That the Data Room Won't
Six families of red flag, the outside records that can surface each one, and what it takes to run each to ground before signing: a document request, a wider scope, a contractual protection, or a specialist's review.
Litigation Support
What Is an Asset Investigation? What It Can Lawfully Establish, and When to Commission One
An asset investigation answers a narrow question with documents: what a subject owns, what is already pledged against it, and what has moved. Its value depends on knowing exactly where the lawful record ends.
Investigations
How an OSINT Investigation Actually Works: Method, Limits, and What a Firm Adds Beyond the Tools
Open-source work is mostly discipline rather than access. The tools return results; the method is what turns a result into something a board can act on, and what it can never turn into anything at all.
Security Services
Close Protection Services: What a Detail Actually Does Day to Day, and When It Is Worth Engaging
The agent standing beside the principal is the smallest and last part of the job. Most of a detail's week happens in buildings the principal has not reached yet, on days before the one in the schedule.
Corporate Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence for Deal Teams and Boards
Not investigation, and not a data subscription. It is a sourced answer to a decision question — assembled almost entirely from public record and lawful primary inquiry, by people who know exactly where the line is.
Fraud Investigation
Corporate Fraud Investigation: What the First Thirty Days Look Like
Almost everything that determines whether money is recovered and whether the evidence survives is decided in the first week — usually before anyone has decided what the investigation is.
Compliance
PEP Screening: What a Hit Actually Means, and How It Gets Resolved
Being a politically exposed person is a risk category, not an accusation. The work is not generating the alert — it is deciding which of several people with that name you are actually dealing with.
Third-Party Risk
Third-Party Risk Management: The Investigative Layer a Platform Cannot Provide
A TPRM platform is a system of record, and a good one. It screens, scores and monitors a whole population continuously. What it does not do — by design — is verify.
Litigation Support
Asset Tracing for Judgment Enforcement: What Attorneys Can Actually Recover
A judgment is a right to collect, not money. The distance between the two is measured in property records, security filings, exemptions and transfers made while the case was still pending.
Private Equity
Investigative Due Diligence for Private Equity: Vetting Management Before the Close
A sponsor underwrites a management team as much as an asset. Financial diligence establishes what the business earned; it is structurally incapable of telling you who is going to run it.
Due Diligence
How to Choose a Due Diligence Company (and What to Ask Before You Sign)
Four different professions are sold under one phrase. Most disappointing engagements are decided before any work starts — in a scope of services nobody read closely enough.
Due Diligence
Vendor Due Diligence Investigations: What Screening Platforms Can't See
Third-party risk platforms are good at what sits above the waterline — watchlists, keywords, questionnaires, scores. Almost everything that has ever gone badly wrong with a vendor sits below it, and only fieldwork reaches down there.
Corporate Intelligence
How to Choose a Corporate Intelligence Firm
The market runs from global brands to two-person shops, the work is invisible until it is delivered, and the deliverable is judgment. Choosing well means asking questions the letterhead cannot answer.
Corporate Investigations
Corporate Investigation Services: What Each Type Covers and Which One Your Situation Calls For
Nobody shops for an investigation. They arrive with a situation — a tip, an unexplained loss, a counterparty they cannot verify, a judgment nobody will pay — and the situation decides which discipline the matter actually belongs to.
Security Services
Security and Threat Assessment for Family Offices
A family office concentrates wealth, decisions, and access around a small number of people — and then runs with a fraction of the security apparatus a corporation of equivalent value would consider mandatory. The exposure is not hypothetical; it is structural.
Corporate Investigations
Internal and Workplace Investigations: When a Company Has to Investigate Itself
Employee fraud, a whistleblower complaint, an allegation against an officer — the moment the subject is inside the building, the question is no longer only what happened. It is whether the company can credibly be the one to find out.
Due Diligence
What Is Investigative Due Diligence?
A definitive explainer on what investigative due diligence is, how it differs from a background check and from financial and legal review, and what a defensible work product looks like.
Litigation Support
Pre-Litigation Due Diligence: What a Litigator Gets From an Investigator Before Filing
The decision to file is a factual decision as much as a legal one. Most of the facts that determine whether a case is worth bringing sit outside the client's file — and outside what discovery will reach in time to matter.
Security Services
Security Risk and Threat Assessments for Corporations, Executives and Families
Two different disciplines are sold under one name. One asks whether a particular person is on a path toward violence. The other asks whether a place, a company, or a family is exposed. Buying the wrong one is the most common mistake in this category.
Cross-Border
Cross-Border Fraud: The Legal Remedies That Actually Recover the Money
Once the money has left the country, the question stops being who did it and becomes what can still be done. The honest answer is that recovery is decided in the first hours by banking mechanisms, and in the following months by whether anyone can prove where the money went. Where a claim has not yet been filed, the same clock argues for [pre-litigation due diligence](/insights/pre-litigation-due-diligence-before-filing) first.
Due Diligence
Due Diligence for Family Offices: Protecting Capital and Reputation
For a family office the question is broader than whether a deal pencils out. It is who you are trusting, with what access, and what happens to the family's capital and name if you are wrong — and the largest losses come from the people closest to the assets.
Due Diligence
Source of Wealth vs Source of Funds: How Each Is Verified
Two different questions, routinely confused: where the money in this transaction came from, and how the person became wealthy in the first place. What each means under the FATF and Wolfsberg standards, what US law actually asks for after FinCEN's August 2026 final rule, and why both are established by corroboration — not by taking the client's word.
Due Diligence
Due Diligence for Private Equity: A Deal Team's Playbook
Funds diligence the numbers, the contracts, and the market rigorously — and the people only lightly. This is the integrity playbook: what to establish about management, ownership, sanctions, and corruption exposure across the deal lifecycle, and why it pays most before signing.
Regulatory
The Corporate Transparency Act in 2026: What the Rollback Means for Beneficial-Ownership Diligence
The CTA was upheld in court, then narrowed by regulation to a fraction of its intended scope, a narrowing FinCEN made permanent in August 2026. Here is what the beneficial-ownership registry actually contains in 2026, what changed abroad at the same time, and why ownership now has to be established investigatively rather than looked up.
Due Diligence
Due Diligence in Miami: Why South Florida Deals Demand a Deeper Look
Miami concentrates international capital, all-cash and shell-company real estate, Latin-American wealth, and the nation's highest per-capita fraud. Here is why a standard check is not enough for a South Florida deal — and what a Miami-grade diligence engagement actually covers.
Cross-Border
Inside a Cross-Border Asset Trace: An Anonymized Methodology
A step-by-step walk through how a cross-border asset trace is actually run — from the first 72 hours to the legal instruments that turn a paper trail into a recovery — told through an anonymized composite engagement.
Litigation Support
Litigation Support Services: Economic Damages, Asset Tracing, and Testimony That Holds Up
What litigation support actually delivers for counsel — how damages are built, how assets are traced, and why the bar for expert testimony rose in 2023.
Security Services
Executive Protection for Corporate Leaders: When to Engage It and What It Costs
The full guide for boards, general counsel, and security leaders: what executive protection is, the three engagement models, what a qualified agent actually is, how close protection works abroad, what drives cost, why boards are re-examining the spend — and why a threat assessment comes before all of it.
Cross-Border Due Diligence
Due Diligence for Foreign Investors Entering the U.S. Market
How an overseas investor, acquirer, or company independently verifies a U.S. target, partner, or counterparty — beneficial ownership, litigation, sanctions and CFIUS, and the on-the-ground reality — before committing capital across a border.
Corporate Intelligence
Corporate Intelligence Services: Frequently Asked Questions
What corporate intelligence services are, who uses them, what an engagement includes and costs, and how to think about the firms that provide them — answered plainly for the boards, deal teams, and counsel who commission the work.
Due Diligence
Enhanced Due Diligence Before an Acquisition: A Buyer's Checklist
The integrity layer that financial and legal review do not reach — when to trigger enhanced due diligence on an acquisition target, the eight areas a buyer must clear before signing, and how to fit it into the deal timeline.
Cross-Border Due Diligence
How to Verify a U.S. Company Before You Sign
A practical, step-by-step framework for foreign investors, international counsel, and offshore counterparties to independently verify an American company, its ownership, and its risk exposure before signing or wiring funds.
Cross-Border
Cross-Border Fraud Investigation: How It Works, Step by Step
How international fraud is investigated, stage by stage: the first hours, tracing value through shell companies, the legal routes to evidence held abroad, and the standard a foreign court will hold the record to.
Due Diligence
Sanctions & Reputational Due Diligence: The M&A Playbook — Three Checks, and Where Each One Stops
Three checks are sold separately, bought separately, and each one stops exactly where the next one starts. This is how they sequence into an M&A timeline early enough that a finding can still change the price.
Investigations
White-Collar Crime Investigations, Explained
A practical guide to how white-collar crime is detected, how corporate and internal investigations are run under privilege, and the role of forensic accounting and the Certified Fraud Examiner standard.
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Fortaris brings senior investigative judgment to the decisions where being wrong is expensive, in confidence.