Est. 1980 40+ Years · Washington Roots
Northwest Investigative Services has been working cases in Washington since 1980. Today the firm handles investigations and locates, asset work, device forensics, surveillance and protection, interviews and statements, and private intelligence. An experienced investigator leads each of those practices.
We have been conducting investigations in Washington State since 1980. That is forty-five years in the same region and more than 38,000 assignments. The firm was founded here and has never been based anywhere else.
Northwest Investigative Services is a Washington-licensed agency serving attorneys, insurers, corporate counsel, and creditors. We work business to business, mostly on matters headed for court or a claim file, and on credit decisions.
That focus was a choice. Asset work and skip tracing depend on local detail, like which county recorders index by grantor and which by parcel, or the fact that a UCC filing names the lender. You also learn when a search has actually run out of places to look. That comes from decades of litigation work in one state. The forensic, interview, security, and field work we now offer is built on the same base.
After four and a half decades in one region, we have built up our own source material. It includes indexed county-level records, historical address and property data going back well before digitization, and business filings that were never scanned into any national system. We also have working relationships with the regional custodians who hold the rest.
National aggregators return what has been digitized and licensed, which covers the easy eighty percent. By the time a file reaches us it has usually failed that search already. Maybe the trail went cold in the nineties, or a transfer was recorded under a variant spelling, or the defendant never had a credit header. Our local data is where we look next, and a good share of those files come back with a usable lead from it.
Clients who switch to us often find our rates lower than what they were paying, and there are plain business reasons for it. We own our source relationships, so there is no national vendor's markup built into the price. Our overhead is that of a specialist firm, without the costs of a general agency. Flagship searches are billed flat against a defined scope, so the hours can't creep up the way they do on many investigative invoices.
Flat fees also mean we have no reason to keep working a file that won't produce. Field work and litigation support are quoted or billed hourly at our published rates. If a search is unlikely to be productive, we say so before you authorize it.
Each file is supervised by one of the investigators below. You can call them directly and ask how they reached a conclusion.
Founder Emeritus
Accident & incident investigation since 1974
Founded the firm. Mike is a retired Washington State Patrol trooper who holds a charter Washington private investigator license, and he has been investigating accidents and incidents for attorneys and insurance adjusters around the country since 1974.
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Chief Executive Officer
Runs the firm; forensic interviewing & investigative psychology
A PhD in psychology who leads the firm's witness interviews, so the accounts you get can be relied on at deposition and trial. He also holds an MBA and runs the agency.
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Chief Operating Officer
Operations, private intelligence & investigative technology
A private investigator since he was 18. He has investigated and consulted for Nintendo, for crime analysts at local law enforcement agencies, and for dozens of local companies.
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Chief Technology Officer
Technology, device forensics, cyber intelligence & security testing
Kyeson oversees the firm's technology and its digital casework, including device forensics, cryptocurrency tracing, OSINT, and penetration testing. He has previously served as CEO, CTO, and CIO of security and intelligence firms.
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Director of Surveillance & Protection
Surveillance operations, protective intelligence & close protection
Chris runs the firm's surveillance operations and protective details. He has spent more than 20 years in surveillance and OSINT and over 15 in close protection for high-profile principals, and he is licensed armed in Washington.
Full profileField Operations
Surveillance, service of process & field documentation
Licensed field investigators who handle surveillance, service of process, and in-person documentation. We leave their names and photos off this site for their safety, and so they can keep working without being recognized.
Full profileFounder Emeritus · Northwest Investigative Services
Mike Briggs started Northwest Investigative Services after a career as a trooper with the Washington State Patrol, from which he is retired. He has been doing accident and incident investigations since 1974, for attorneys and insurance adjusters all over the United States, and he holds one of the original charter Washington private investigator licenses.
A lot of how the firm works today came from Mike. He goes to the scene and talks to the people who were there. He writes down what can be proven before anyone starts arguing about what it means. The current team still works that way, and still relies on regional sources he built up over five decades.
Mike has been married for nearly fifty years. In his spare time he enjoys Corvettes and other classic sports cars, and anything to do with the sun and water.
Chief Executive Officer · Northwest Investigative Services
Dr. Shane Harrington runs Northwest Investigative Services as its chief executive officer. He decides where the firm is headed and what its reports have to meet before they go out with the firm's name on them. He holds a PhD in psychology, with an emphasis in health psychology and investigative research, and an MBA in project management and strategic planning.
Shane has worked as an investigator, analyst, and consultant since 2001. He still takes cases himself, usually the ones that turn on an interview. His post-doctoral work is in investigative psychology and forensic victimology. In practice that means understanding how memory and trauma affect what a person reports, and knowing how to ask questions so the answers can be relied on. He conducts and supervises the firm's witness interviews and recorded statements. His background also includes years of criminal defense investigation and mitigation work with defense attorneys, which is where much of his interviewing experience comes from.
He oversees all of the firm's service lines, including locates and asset work and the newer device forensics and surveillance operations practices. Before he became an investigator he was a licensed EMT, and for six years he taught Basic Life Support for a regional hospital. That experience still comes in handy on files involving injuries, medical records, or mental health.
Chief Operating Officer · Northwest Investigative Services
Joshua Bullock is the chief operating officer of Northwest Investigative Services. He has been a private investigator since he was 18.
Over the years he has investigated and consulted for Nintendo, for crime analysts at local law enforcement agencies, and for dozens of companies around Washington. Before taking on operations at NWISI he worked in intelligence, and he is also a software developer.
As COO he runs the firm day to day and works alongside the directors of each practice. He is based in Renton.
Chief Technology Officer · Northwest Investigative Services
As chief technology officer, Kyeson Utley is in charge of the systems Northwest Investigative Services runs on, including its search and forensics platforms, and of how client data is kept secure. Most of the firm's digital casework also goes through him.
He heads the new device forensics practice. Attorneys and companies bring him phones, computers, and accounts, often spread over several devices, in civil matters and internal investigations. His reports cover what the data shows and what it doesn't, along with how each item was handled. When money has moved on-chain, he traces where it went and how much went to whom. He then writes it up so it can support a motion, a subpoena to an exchange, or a referral to law enforcement.
His other work includes OSINT and digital footprint tracing, darknet analysis, threat management, and authorized penetration testing and social engineering assessments. He also does due diligence on crypto ventures and the people behind them. Earlier in his career he was CEO of an international private intelligence agency, where he built and ran its blockchain forensics program. He has also been director of cyber operations for an investigative firm and CIO of a security services company. He founded Ghostkey Development, a privacy-first software and security firm, and he gives talks to the legal investigation community.
Director of Surveillance & Protection · Northwest Investigative Services
Chris Frazier directs surveillance and protection for Northwest Investigative Services. On the surveillance operations side, he plans each operation, leads the field team through it, and makes sure the footage and logs are solid before they reach the client. He has more than 20 years of experience in surveillance and OSINT.
Chris also directs the firm's executive protection work. He has spent more than 15 years in close protection and protective intelligence, including time as a protective intelligence agent in Las Vegas. He has protected high-profile principals at the BET Awards, the ACM Awards, the NATAS Emmy Awards in Seattle, and the FIFA Club World Cup 2025. On those details he handled venue advances and route and movement planning, along with crowd and media management. His corporate clients have included Fortune 500 companies in technology, aerospace, aviation, and entertainment.
The firm's protective intelligence work grows out of that experience. Before a detail begins, he does the threat assessment and looks at how exposed the principal is online. He is licensed in Washington as an armed private investigator and as an armed security officer, and he holds concealed carry credentials in Washington and Nevada. He has trained in martial arts for 30 years and is a Jukido combat instructor. Chris graduated from Colorado State University. He speaks English and Japanese, and some Spanish.
Field Operations · Northwest Investigative Services
Some work has to be done in person. The field team handles surveillance and service of process, and documents people, places, and property. We leave their names and photographs off this website on purpose. People who have been watched or served sometimes go looking for the investigator, and field work only works if the investigator can't be recognized.
We use surveillance to confirm things like activity, residence, employment, or a claimed limitation. It is documented with time-stamped video, photographs, and written logs. For service of process we do our own skip tracing, so when an address turns out to be bad we find the right one and keep going. If service can't be made, we provide a diligence affidavit listing each attempt.
Everyone on the team is a licensed investigator. Surveillance operations are directed by Chris Frazier, Director of Surveillance & Protection. Each file is also supervised by one of the investigators named on this page, who can sign a declaration if the matter calls for one. More about surveillance operations.
The investigators above are your contacts, but they don't do all the work themselves. Files are worked by a team of analysts and licensed investigators, assigned based on what the matter needs.
With that setup, a $200 skip trace can come back in two days while a portfolio of four hundred bulk reports runs as a batch. It also lets us treat OSINT as its own specialty. The analysts doing digital footprint work are different people from the investigators who go to the county auditor's office.
Each file still has one investigator who is accountable for it, and that person signs the declaration if the matter needs one.
Introduce your firm and we'll confirm your terms and rates, including any volume tier.