At Dasciad we love a solid case win, when we efficiently find the most valuable information to help our clients with important problems.
But what really makes us chuckle, is when that information comes from the library, be it a physical book, an interview with a librarian, or digging through microfiche or paper copies of newspapers.
Below are four noteworthy Dasciad wins, that came straight out of the library:
Working for the Bankruptcy Trustee
The research subject was a CEO whose large insurance company had filed for bankruptcy, decimating the local economy. We were hired by the bankruptcy trustee to recover assets for the shareholders. I stopped by the local library when my research subject lived and worked. After chatting with the librarian, she told me the library team had made a daily project of physically clipping all articles naming the subject and his company. Rather than searching through microfiche copies of the local newspapers for hours or days, I left after 10 minutes with copies of numerous folders of articles that the librarians had painstakingly put together and were happy to share with me. The articles led to personal assets, as well as leads to local journalists who were intimately familiar with the CEO and his personal wealth.
Background of a Board Candidate
Paid databases usually contain only the current version of an individuals’ personal or professional biography, but previous versions are deleted. On a hunch that the research subject was misrepresenting themselves regarding their education and employment, I visited the library and compared their annual Who’s Who Biographies. I discover that over the course of 10 years, the research subject had slowly altered and tweaked their biographical statements in order to improve their presentation – placing themselves firmly in the domain of misrepresentation and omission. The client chose another candidate for the board director role.
Locating Machinery and Equipment
A copy of a book we needed was not online, so I checked it out of the library. There in the footnotes near the end of the book was a reference to several million dollars in machinery and equipment owned by the research subject overseas. The client was able to work with local attorneys to attach these assets for collection to satisfy a multi-million-dollar judgment.
Old Criminal Records
In an executive background, we spotted a deleted 1980s criminal case. The criminal case file had been destroyed by the court. We knew the conviction became the foundation of the research subject’s professional and personal trajectory. We called the local library, and the librarian offered to search the microfilm of local news from that time frame to locate a police blotter. She called back with the results of her research, allowing us to round out our understanding of our subject for that cornerstone time frame.
For more information, please reach out to us at requests@dasciad.com or 1.800.323.0846.
