Philip Becnel published an excerpt of Principles of Investigative Documentation in Pursuit Magazine. The article, called “A Memo to the File,” relates an experience when a client rudely chastised one of our investigators because he did not like the content of a report she wrote. The attorney’s behavior spurred Philip ...

Principles of Investigative Documentation, Second Edition, came out yesterday. A collaboration between Philip Becnel, Alexandra Becnel, and former-Dinolt-investigator-turned-attorney Scott Krischke, the book details how to document an investigation using what Philip originally coined as the “Five Principles of Investigative Documentation.” The authors reworked the Second Edition into a pseudo-memoir in Philip’s ...

Following a guilty plea for wire and securities fraud by Danny Boice, the founder of Trustify, the now-defunct “Uber for private investigators,” The Washington Post quoted our founder, Philip Becnel.  ‘I knew it was a scam,’ said Philip Becnel, a partner at a D.C. private investigations firm and early Trustify critic. ‘I knew that there ...

Our Managing Partner, Philip Becnel, was featured on the Dream Jobs segment of the “The Why” on Newsy. During the interview, he talked about how he became a private investigator in D.C. and about different types of surveillance. ...

As private investigators, we’ve helped attorneys evaluate potential healthcare fraud claims against nursing homes, hospitals, physicians and other providers over the years. The vast majority of this research involves examining information already made public by state and federal agencies. But this information isn’t just for legal and healthcare professionals. It’s made ...

Only Philip Becnel could write such a stimulating article about investigative ethics. In his Pursuit Magazine feature, called “Re-examining Private Investigator Ethics in a Divided Political Era,” our managing partner divulged a never-before-reported piece of news relevant to the Trump/Russia investigation and provided a tantalizing forecast into his new novel, ...

Managing Partner Philip Becnel was quotes in a Snopes article concerning a lawsuit filed by Rod Wheeler over a since-debunked Fox News story. The original story alleged that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich might have been responsible for hacking of DNC emails before the 2016 presidential election, despite ...

When Jim McElhatton left The Washington Times to join Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group as an investigator in early 2015, he pledged to keep his hand in journalism by writing an occasional freelance article on important topics that interest him. Last summer he published “Invisible Tape,” about a man convicted ...

Philip Becnel and Joe Belfiore published an article, titled “Turning Around Crime-Plagued Properties,” in The Property Professional, a bimonthly magazine published by the National Property Management Association. “For the multi-family owner or manager, resolving a pest infestation is almost a professional rite of passage,” begins the article’s summary. “But when the pests ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...