What is Our Engagement Structure?
Engagement structure refers to how our investigative services are organized based on client needs and firm capacity. This ensures optimal service delivery.
Aligning with Client Needs
By aligning engagements with essential client expectations, our firm can provide tailored solutions that meet specific legal challenges.
Without structure, an investigation can easily become driven by whatever information appears next. One discovery leads to another question, another person, another database search, another theory—and eventually the original objective becomes difficult to identify. That can increase cost, expose unnecessary information, and produce a large amount of material without producing much clarity.
Our structure across several functions:
- Creates the investigative objective. It converts a client’s story, concern, allegation, or uncertainty into specific questions that can actually be investigated.
- Controls scope. It establishes what Salas is authorized to investigate, what falls outside the engagement, and when additional authorization is necessary.
- Prioritizes resources. It helps determine which records, people, databases, field activities, interviews, or other investigative steps should come first.
- Protects discretion. Information is compartmentalized and shared according to need rather than allowing unnecessary circulation of sensitive case information.
- Separates allegation from evidence. Client statements, third-party claims, documented facts, investigator observations, analytical conclusions, and unresolved questions should remain distinguishable.
- Creates continuity. A matter can develop over weeks or months without losing its chronology, objectives, decisions, sources, or next steps.
- Supports quality assurance. Findings can be reviewed against the underlying sources and against the actual question the investigation was intended to answer.
- Manages cost. Investigation can proceed in logical phases, allowing Salas and the client to determine whether another expenditure is justified before expanding the work.
- Supports litigation readiness. Where litigation is involved, organized timelines, sourcing, documentation, preservation, and coordination with counsel become part of the structure.
- Creates an endpoint. A professional investigation should have a mechanism for determining when the objective has been answered, when additional work is justified, or when further work is unlikely to create sufficient value.