Field Notes: The Bridge Between Borders

It started with a call from a German-American attorney I had worked with before.

He represented a U.S. based healthcare technology company that was expanding into Europe, planning to set up its base of operations in Germany. The client was ambitious, well funded, and moving fast. They had the right lawyers, the right accountants, and the right partners, or at least, they thought they did.

The attorney’s question was simple: Can you tell us what we don’t know yet?

He wanted me to perform an independent intelligence review before contracts were signed, a discreet layer of verification that would sit quietly behind the legal diligence already underway. The idea wasn’t to question his work. It was to complement it. He understood that in cross border transactions, the difference between a good deal and a headline often comes down to the details no one thought to verify.

The Assignment

My scope was to validate the German counterparties, the potential local distributor, a few investors, and one consulting firm that had appeared late in the process and seemed to be facilitating introductions. I’ve learned that those are usually the entities worth looking at first.

Legal teams can interpret what’s in front of them. My job is to find what isn’t.

The attorney wanted answers that would stand up under privilege, so we structured the engagement accordingly. I operated as his investigator, which kept the work product protected while giving him direct access to intelligence that would inform his advice to the client.

We started with corporate records and moved outward: ownership, litigation history, regulatory filings, sanctions exposure, and public procurement records. Then we moved into the less obvious, local media coverage, industry chatter, and the reputational layer that rarely crosses borders in translation.

What We Found

Most of what we found was clean, which is how you want these cases to go. But one of the investors caught my attention. On paper it was a private investment firm with a benign name and a moderate portfolio. In reality, its largest limited partner was a state owned healthcare consortium based in another jurisdiction, one already under scrutiny for procurement irregularities.

Nothing illegal. But problematic.

The attorney immediately understood the implications. If the U.S. company moved forward without addressing that connection, they would inherit a reputational risk they could not control. Worse, it could raise red flags under certain disclosure or export compliance regimes if the relationship deepened over time.

Together we prepared a confidential memorandum for the general counsel and the board. He laid out the legal framework. I provided the intelligence findings and documentation. The company quietly restructured the deal, preserving the partnership but eliminating the problematic investor from the table.

The Lesson

That case reminded me how well the legal and investigative worlds can work together when there is trust. Attorneys operate within frameworks. Investigators operate between them.

When those two disciplines meet, the result isn’t duplication. It is depth. The attorney interprets what is known. The investigator verifies what is unknown. Both are necessary, and both ultimately serve the same goal: to protect the client before the problem exists.

In this case, the company avoided a future complication, the attorney strengthened his client’s position, and everyone walked away knowing they had done it right.

They could have brought me in directly. The company could have hired me as part of their own diligence process. But by coming through counsel, the work stayed protected, cohesive, and aligned with the broader legal strategy. That is often the best way to operate, quietly, collaboratively, and just far enough behind the scenes to make a difference before anyone notices there was something to fix.