If you’ve known me for any length of time, you probably know that locating people has been a passion of mine for 25+ years. Maybe it stems from my roots working at the U.S. Marshals and tracking down the most dangerous people on Planet Earth. But truthfully, I find true enjoyment in locating anyone for any reason, even if it’s for service of process in a civil automobile crash case.
So, here’s a little secret… If you want to be good at locating folks, you need to learn how to conduct a thorough person of interest investigation. And to do so, you must extend past the routine database searches. The databases are amazing tools, and our lives would be miserable without them, but they are simply one type of tool that we can use.
I was reminded of this earlier this week while looking for a person that “nobody could find” for a law firm. It took me all of about 60 minutes to close the case. What did I do? I ran a quick litigation check to see if the individual was recently involved in any court cases. Presto, the individual had filed their own lawsuit against someone just a few days earlier. A quick drive over to the Clerk of Superior Court to review the court record yielded their current address, email address, telephone number, and new legal name (they had legally changed their name, but the court record referenced the old name).
Get creative. Get excited. Expand your investigation beyond the proprietary data aggregators.