A couple of years ago, I sought a more efficient method for conducting comprehensive research to locate individuals, encompassing various aspects. I am accustomed to public records, news, and business research on Lexis+ and Westlaw, and I was a long-time TLOxp user, among other resources. As a legal info pro at a law firm, I do all the usual public records research—finding current contact information and past addresses, birth and death dates, family relationships, real property and other assets, court records, professional licenses, corporation filings, and the like. I access public records on a major legal information platform and supplement that research with other sources. But I wanted to pull together more comprehensive reports on people and businesses that would draw from public records, including the open web and social media and present them in one cohesive, clean report with metadata when we need it. After a period of product evaluation, we selected Skopenow Workbench, a tool that I would describe as entry level into Skopenow’s family of products.
Skopenow is an open-source intelligence (OSINT) people search platform that has been in business since 2016, initially serving primarily the insurance industry. It now has about 1,500 customers in many sectors including law firms, security, law enforcement, government, and media. Main selling points for the legal sector include the breadth and depth of sources Skopenow uses, the ability to capture screenshots with metadata, the utility of results for courtroom use, and helpful reports for due diligence purposes.
As legal information professionals would expect, searches and filters are quite granular. I can enter as much or as little information as I have (including employers, schools, domains, and more) and then limit or filter as needed. Features that I find very useful when researching a potential juror, the “bad guy” in a case, or a person with an extensive social media footprint are Skopenow’s keywords and behavior flags. Behavior flags like physical activities, risky behaviors, and injuries, along with keywords, can help surface especially relevant results. In addition to residential or business addresses, Skopenow will also provide geolocation information.
I appreciate the tailored reports that I share with our attorneys. Very customizable, the report can be as thorough or focused as the need requires. For example, users can include or exclude metadata; particular types of results like dark web fraudulent use of emails; underlying data; particular web mentions or articles; screenshots; URLs; and more. The reports use headings and white space well; they are uncluttered and clear.
Skopenow is not inexpensive. When I contemplated a license, I considered the time spent by me and attorneys as we ran public records and people-finding searches across a multitude of sources. As one attorney evaluator commented, “Could we do this research without Skopenow? Yes, but it would take far longer.” Further, the results would either be potentially confusing, coming from multiple sources, or someone would have to painstakingly massage all the material into one tidy report. I sometimes run searches on more than one platform, not only to compare results, but also to demonstrate the variety of data we can pull from our sources and to highlight the actionable, clean reports I can get from Skopenow.
As with all public records sources, results can include seemingly erroneous information that an experienced researcher can often explain (e.g., a motor vehicle that a person no longer owns tied to that person by a VIN or registration, email addresses or phone numbers associated with an adult child or ex-spouse). A search for myself yields some strange results initially, such as an obituary and various accounts that are not mine. The user still needs to review the results carefully to make sense of them before acting. But I appreciate that I can limit results to those with high search confidence and can easily delete unneeded or questionable items from reports. Note that social media data extraction is limited because of countermeasures taken by some of the social media platforms. Skopenow provides excellent customer support with live chat, dedicated support personnel, white papers and guides, and deep dives into fascinating Open source intelligence (OSINT) topics on monthly webinars. Skopenow has other add-ons or products for link analysis, threat assessment, and fraud detection for a comprehensive open-source intelligence platform. For more information, see https://www.skopenow.com/.
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