Philip Becnel’s July 2015 article, “When Your Lover is a Liar,” was ranked one of the “Top 10 Pursuit Magazine Stories of 2015.” According to the magazine, a self-described “online community of professional sleuths,” their stories were ranked by using an algorithm based upon reader participation (e.g., clicks, comments, shares). Philip’s ...

Philip Becnel published a modified excerpt of his book, Principles of Investigative Documentation, in the Fall 2015 edition of the Legal Investigator, a publication of the National Association of Legal Investigators. In the article, Philip outlined what he coined the “Five Principles of Investigative Documentation,” which include taking notes, keeping ...

We’re so excited to announce that Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group LLC has again been named the “Best Private Investigations Provider” of 2015 by the Legal Times! We are by any measure a small company in a very crowded market, so the fact that we have been able to ...

The Freedom of Information Act request process can be frustrating and expensive, and backlogs have been an increasing problem. By the government’s own estimate, there were 159,741 requests in backlog in 2014 compared to 95,524 in 2013. For private investigators, attorneys, journalists and the general public, the short term need ...

About a year ago, a nonprofit group turned to us for help finding family members of deceased veterans who came into contact with Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide used during the Vietnam War. In these sorts of cases, investigative databases only help so much because some veterans died decades ...

Tonight, at a funeral home in Michigan, family, friends and colleagues of journalist and private investigator Pat Clawson will  pay their respects to the 60-year-old who died last week. A few years back, Pat called me when I was working as a reporter. He urged me – to put it mildly ...

The baseball Post Season is about to begin, and we can’t think of a more fitting time to announce that we filled our recent investigator opening! We realize this seems like a non sequitur, but bear with us. Hiring a new person is an arduous process for every company, but the task ...

Do you have a voracious appetite for information and an aptitude for figuring out unfamiliar concepts, and are you an exceptional writer? If so, you might be who we’re looking for! Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group LLC is actively seeking candidates to fill a new investigator position in our Arlington ...

It’s hard to think of a more fitting day than Labor Day to officially announce the launch of our new website. We live in an era when many types of services are becoming automated, and some people are even attempting to market investigative services through an app. When we were ...

Investigator Jim McElhatton published an article in the Washington City Paper about how the D.C. police lost a surreptitiously recorded confession to a murder and how a man convicted of that murder (not the person on the missing tape) is trying to find it in hopes of exonerating himself. Quoting a ...

Our managing partner, Philip Becnel, was quoted in an article in Pursuit Magazine, a trade publication for private investigators. The article, called “Should We Trust Trustify?” states: When it comes to Trustify, one of the dominant voices of skepticism comes from Philip Becnel, a partner with the D.C. firm Dinolt Becnel & ...

Philip Becnel, our managing partner, published an article in Law.com called, “Can Investigations be Uber-ized?” The article is a critique of start-up Trustify, which offers investigations for cheap through an app interface. Philip is a regular contributor to Law.com. Here is an excerpt from the article: As it happened, the whole exercise ...