Est. 1980 40+ Years · Washington Roots
Northwest Investigative Services has been investigating in Washington State since 1980. We locate people, map assets, and identify banking and brokerage relationships for litigation — drawing on four decades of proprietary Northwest source data and privately sourced OSINT, at published flat rates.
Most litigation investigations come down to two questions: where is this party, and what can actually be reached. We answer both, and we show our work.
Current residence, telephone, employment, and known associates for parties who have moved, are hard to distinguish by name, or do not want to be found. We work the ones that came back empty from a database pull.
A documented picture of what a person or entity owns: real property, titled personal property, business interests, secured filings, judgments, liens, and bankruptcy history — with the recording data behind each finding.
Identification of deposit, securities, and merchant processing relationships to support garnishment, levy, and pre-suit collectibility work. Every request is gated on a documented, lawful permissible purpose before we begin.
Policy existence, limits, and umbrella coverage — no fee at all if we can't find the limits.
DetailBulk service backed by our own skip tracing, with diligence affidavits when service fails.
DetailIn-person witness interviews, recorded statements, records retrieval, and background research.
DetailEntity structure, beneficial ownership, principal background, and litigation history.
DetailThree things separate us from a database subscription and from the national panels most firms default to. None of them are marketing claims — they're structural.
We did not open a Washington branch. We started in Washington in 1980 and never left. Four and a half decades in one region is why cold files come back warm — the institutional memory of how records were kept here before they were digitized cannot be bought, only accumulated.
Our own indexed local records and historical property data — much of it predating digitization and carried by no national aggregator — plus privately sourced open source intelligence run by people with cyber and military intelligence backgrounds. When the database returns nothing, this is what we go to next.
Our full price list is public — no call-for-a-quote. Rates are set by what the underlying data costs to license and maintain, not by undercutting the next vendor. Financial searches carry no-hit pricing, and recurring volume moves down a sliding scale.
Anyone can buy a data aggregator subscription. The value is in what happens after the export: reconciling conflicting records, ruling out same-name subjects, confirming a finding against a second independent source, and writing it up so it can be attached to a motion.
Establish whether a defendant can satisfy a judgment before your client funds the litigation.
Locate the debtor and the reachable assets, and target garnishments and levies precisely.
Trace conveyances to relatives, shell entities, and trusts, with the recording chain documented.
Inventory holdings across entities and jurisdictions for receivers, trustees, and marital estates.
Verify who is really behind an entity, and what litigation and lien history follows them.
Serve the unserveable, find the witness who moved, and identify heirs in probate matters.
We capture the subject data, the matter, and the lawful basis for the search, and document it in the file.
You receive a written search plan with a flat fee and a delivery date before any work begins.
Records are pulled, reconciled, and corroborated. Conflicts get resolved or get flagged — not buried.
A structured report with sources, exhibits, and — on request — a declaration of the investigator.
Financial account information is protected by federal law. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act makes it a crime to obtain customer information from a financial institution under false pretenses — and a crime to request that someone else do it for you. A vendor who does not ask you why you need the search is a liability on your matter, not a resource.
We document a permissible purpose on every engagement, decline work that does not have one, and never pretext financial institutions. Our reports are investigative work product and are not consumer reports under the FCRA.
We would rather lose the assignment than hand you a report you can't use.
We don't take search orders through a web form. Tell us who you are and what you send, and we'll open an account — then assignments run directly with an investigator who knows your matters.