A lawyer opens the register and sees a director, an incorporation date, an activity code and a share capital. That is enough to understand who the contract is formally being signed with. The formal picture and the real one are not the same thing — and the distance between them is fact work, not legal work.
The real owner hides behind a nominee director. The ownership chain runs through two or three holding companies and stops in a jurisdiction with no public beneficial-ownership register. A sanctions trail appears not on the company itself but on a person one step away from it. Property that looks like an asset turns out to be pledged.
Digging that out is factual work, which some people do daily and others once a quarter. Whoever does it daily does it faster and cheaper. The lawyer stays on their own ground: legal qualification, strategy, the client.
It is not only about time. It is about instruments and the habit of reading them. Sanctions lists across several jurisdictions, public offshore-leak datasets, the court judgments register, enforcement data, procurement records, satellite imagery for asset verification, web archives for what a company said about itself two years ago. Each of these is learnable. Keeping all of them current, and knowing which one answers which question, is a full-time discipline.
A concrete shape: a client comes to the firm before buying a stake. The register shows two individual founders and a modest share capital — clean on the surface. Intelligence shows that both founders appear in a cluster of companies around a third person who is not in any filing, that one of those companies went through insolvency last year, and that the workshop carrying the valuation is pledged against a loan. None of that is a legal conclusion. All of it changes the advice the firm gives.
The boundary here matters, and it is simple. We do not give legal opinions and we do not advise the firm's client. We collect facts from open sources, structure them and score the risk. What is done with those facts is the lawyer's work and the lawyer's signature.
The analogy comes from firms' own practice. When a matter needs a property valuation, a lawyer instructs an independent valuer. When the technical condition of an object is in question, a technical expert. Nobody calls that outsourcing legal services, because the valuer does not practise law — they supply a fact the lawyer then uses.
That also settles the ethical question. The firm is not reselling someone else's legal work under its own name, because there is no legal work in our report at all. There are facts collected lawfully and a risk score built on them. The legal position is the firm's, and it always was.
Everything we collect sits inside the law and open sources. That is not a detail for a lawyer: material obtained lawfully survives challenge, and material obtained otherwise transfers liability to whoever commissioned it.
For a firm the first question is not "can you find this" but "can this harm us or our client". So the regime is fixed in advance.
Conflict check before acceptance. Before taking a mandate we cross-check the subject against current and former clients. If the subject is a current client, or was one recently, we decline. Where an adjacent conflict exists, we disclose it before starting.
Client data does not travel. The fact of the instruction, the firm's name, the subject of the check and the content of the report are not disclosed to anyone outside the work on that specific mandate. They are not used in marketing, case studies or publications without separate written consent. Only the analyst working the mandate has access to the materials.
An engagement letter, not a phone call. Subject, purpose, scope, deadline, report format, confidentiality and limitations are written down before work begins.
A firewall from public work. Materials from client mandates are never used in open investigations, and we do not publicly investigate anyone who is or has been a client.
Those four rules close the partner's actual fear: that an external contractor leaks data, serves both sides of a dispute, or exposes the firm to its own client. For the firm this is also a question of its own liability — handing a report to a client means vouching for it under its own name, so the collection regime behind it has to be as strict as the firm's own.
The report arrives with no mention of Argus — not in the text, not in the running heads, not in the file metadata. You apply the firm's letterhead, add your own conclusion where needed, and pass it to the client or into the file.
Inside is what the check was ordered for. Ownership structure unwound to the real beneficiary. Screening against sanctions and PEP lists. Litigation and enforcement history, debts. Signs of asset stripping and encumbrances on property. Where the matter warrants it, satellite verification of physical assets and a search of public offshore-leak datasets. Every finding carries its source, so that any statement can be checked independently.
The format is flexible. Some matters need a two-page conclusion for a fast client decision; others need a twenty- to thirty-page dossier for a complex transaction or a dispute. Scope is agreed at the brief.
Start with a single pilot report at $349. That is a way to assess depth and format without commitment: order one check, see what arrives, then decide about a regular arrangement. Retainers run from $899 a month for three reports and $1399 for five with a rush slot.
The economics are straightforward. An in-house OSINT analyst capable of actually unwinding offshore chains costs a firm several times the retainer per month — and that assumes there is enough work to keep them occupied. Below a certain volume of matters, the fixed cost of a person is simply worse than a per-report one.
The comparison worth running is your own: take a partner's or senior associate's hourly rate, multiply by the hours that go into collecting this data manually for one counterparty, and set that against a fixed report price. In most firms the fixed price wins before the second hour.
A retainer also buys predictability. You know the cost of a check in advance and can put it into the client's estimate as a separate line rather than as diffuse "due diligence hours". The client sees what they are paying for, and the firm keeps the margin and the client relationship.
Related reading: what an evidentiary format requires, in due diligence evidence standards, and the assessment that decides whether a claim is worth bringing, in pre-litigation risk assessment.
A due diligence fact layer delivered under your firm's brand, with every trace of us stripped from the file. Pilot report $349, retainers from $899 a month, conflict check and confidentiality firewall fixed in advance.