Est. 1980 40+ Years · Washington Roots
Forty-five years in one discipline, in one state.
Northwest Investigative Services has been investigating in Washington since 1980. We do litigation support and asset intelligence — not surveillance volume, not everything-for-everyone. The searches that determine whether a case is worth pursuing and whether a judgment is worth enforcing.
Roots in Washington
We have been conducting investigations in Washington State since 1980 — forty-five years, continuously, in the same region. We did not open a Northwest branch office. We started here, and the sources, the staff, and the licensing have been here the entire time.
Northwest Investigative Services is the Washington-licensed practice serving attorneys, corporate counsel, and creditors. We operate as a DBA of CCIG and are affiliated with Sirius Investigations. The Northwest Investigative Services name exists to make one thing unambiguous: this is the litigation and B2B practice.
We took that focus deliberately. Asset work and skip tracing reward depth — knowing which county recorder indexes by grantor and which by parcel, knowing that a UCC filing names the lender, knowing when a search is genuinely exhausted rather than merely finished. That knowledge does not develop in a firm that does a bit of everything, and it does not develop in five years.
Proprietary local data
Four and a half decades in one region produces something a subscription cannot: our own source material. Indexed county-level records, historical address and property data going back well before digitization, business filings that were never scanned into any national system, and working relationships with the regional custodians who hold the rest.
National aggregators return what has been digitized and licensed. That covers the easy eighty percent. The files that come to us have usually already failed that search — a trail that goes cold in the nineties, a transfer recorded under a variant spelling, a defendant who has never had a credit header. Our local data is what we go to next, and it is the single biggest reason our hit rate on hard subjects is what it is.
Why we cost less
We are consistently the most cost-effective firm our clients compare us against, and it is structural rather than promotional. We own our source relationships instead of reselling a national vendor's product at a markup. We carry specialist overhead, not general-agency overhead. And flagship searches are billed flat against a defined scope, so the hourly expansion that inflates investigative invoices is simply not part of the engagement.
The corollary matters as much: because we are not billing hours, we have no incentive to keep working a file that will not produce. If a search is unlikely to be productive, we say so before you authorize it.
How we work
- Scoped and priced in writing before we start. No open-ended hourly drift on flagship searches.
- Cross-reference before reporting. A single database hit is a lead, not a finding — and no record is proof until someone confirms it in person.
- Source every material fact. You should always be able to tell a record from an inference.
- Report negatives honestly. "We found nothing, and here is everything we searched" is a real deliverable and often the most valuable one.
- Decline what we shouldn't take. Detailed on our compliance page.
Licensing & credentials
- Washington private investigative agency license 22031080, Chapter 18.165 RCW
You'll know who is working your file.
At most agencies your assignment disappears into a queue and comes back with a logo on it. Here you deal with the person doing the work — and you can ask them, directly, how they reached a conclusion.
Joshua Bullock
Partner · Northwest Investigative Services
Joshua Bullock is a partner at Northwest Investigative Services, where he leads the litigation and asset practice. He came to private investigations as an intelligence professional, and he brought the method with him: collect from multiple independent sources, corroborate before you conclude, and be honest about the difference between what a record says and what you think it means. Applied to litigation, that discipline answers one narrow question well — where a party is, what they hold, and whether any of it can actually be reached.
He is a multi-faceted investigator rather than a specialist in one technique, which is what the work actually requires. A single judgment-enforcement file can move from database research to county records to digital footprint analysis to a conversation on a doorstep, and a firm that only does one of those returns a file that only got one of those done. Josh works the whole arc, leveraging more than 45 years of accumulated source material, technique, and proprietary data.
Josh works alongside a team of analysts and licensed investigators, and draws on the cyber intelligence and blockchain forensics capability of the firm's affiliated practices when a matter calls for it. He works with litigation counsel, corporate legal departments, and creditors across Washington and nationwide.
“Unveiling assets and accounts thought to be hidden makes debtors come to the table.”
- Licensed Washington private investigator, license 22031080
- Based Renton, Washington
- Background Intelligence professional
- Focus Asset investigation, judgment enforcement, skip tracing, OSINT
- Connect LinkedIn
Not a one-person shop.
A principal investigator is who you talk to. He is not who does all of it. Files here are worked by a team of analysts and licensed investigators, assigned by what the matter actually needs rather than by who happens to be free.
That structure is why a $200 skip trace comes back in two days and a portfolio of four hundred bulk reports comes back as a batch. It is also why the OSINT layer is a real discipline here — the people running digital footprint analysis are not the same people walking into a county auditor's office, and neither is pretending to be the other.
- Research analysts — records retrieval, database work, entity and property mapping, and bulk report production.
- Licensed field investigators — service of process, in-person witness interviews, and property documentation.
- OSINT and cyber analysts — digital footprint development, account and identifier correlation, and blockchain tracing, drawn from our affiliated cyber practice.
- Licensed local associates — for field work outside Washington, engaged under the destination state's licensing requirements and disclosed to you in writing.
Every file still has one named investigator accountable for it, and that is the person who signs a declaration if the matter needs one.
Work with us on your next matter.
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