Est. 1980 40+ Years · Washington Roots
Northwest Investigative Services has been investigating in Washington since 1980. We do litigation support and asset intelligence: the searches, field work, and analysis that determine whether a case is worth pursuing and whether a judgment is worth enforcing.
We have been conducting investigations in Washington State since 1980. That is forty-five years, continuously, in the same region, and more than 38,000 assignments in that time. 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 a Washington-licensed agency serving attorneys, insurers, corporate counsel, and creditors. It is a business-to-business practice, built for work that ends up in a court file, a claim file, or a credit decision.
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 truly exhausted and not just finished. That knowledge comes from decades of litigation work in one state, and it does not develop in five years. The forensic, mitigation, security, and field work we now offer is built on the same base.
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 how many of those files come back with a usable lead.
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 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 flagship searches are flat-fee, we have no incentive to keep working a file that will not 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.
At most agencies your assignment disappears into a queue and comes back with a logo on it. Here every file is supervised by a named investigator you can talk to directly. You can ask them how they reached a conclusion.
Founder Emeritus
Accident & incident investigation since 1974
Founded the firm. A retired Washington State Patrol trooper and charter holder of a Washington private investigator license, he has investigated accidents and incidents for attorneys and insurance adjusters nationwide since 1974.
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Private Intelligence & Investigative Technology
Private intelligence, asset investigation & software development
Leads private intelligence and the litigation and asset practice. An intelligence professional and software developer who finds what a debtor has hidden, then documents it so thoroughly that opposing counsel has nothing to pull apart.
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Forensic Interviewing & Mitigation
Forensic and witness interviewing, mitigation & criminal matters
A doctorate in psychology applied to investigation. Conducts forensic and witness interviews built to hold up, and supports attorneys in criminal matters with investigation and mitigation.
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Device Forensics & Cyber Intelligence
Device forensics, cryptocurrency tracing & cyber investigations
Runs the digital side of a file. Device forensics for attorneys in civil and criminal matters, cryptocurrency tracing for asset recovery, and OSINT and darknet analysis. A former CEO, CTO, and CIO of security and intelligence firms.
Full profileField Operations
Surveillance, service of process & field documentation
Licensed field investigators who handle surveillance, service of process, and in-person documentation. Their names and photos are left off this site on purpose, for their safety and so they can keep working unrecognized.
Full profileFounder Emeritus · Northwest Investigative Services
Mike Briggs founded Northwest Investigative Services. He has been performing accident and incident investigations since 1974, for attorneys and insurance adjusters from all over the United States. He came to the work as a trooper with the Washington State Patrol, from which he is retired, and he holds one of the original charter Washington private investigator licenses.
The firm's working habits started with him: go to the scene, talk to the people who were there, and document what can be proven before anyone argues about what it means. Those habits, and the regional sources built up over five decades, are what the current team still works from.
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.
Private Intelligence & Investigative Technology · Northwest Investigative Services
Joshua Bullock leads private intelligence at Northwest Investigative Services, along with its litigation and asset practice. He came to private investigation from intelligence work, and he still works like an analyst: collect from independent sources, corroborate before concluding, and never confuse what a record says with what someone wishes it said. On a judgment-enforcement file, that discipline answers the only questions that matter. Where is the debtor, what do they hold, and can any of it actually be reached?
He works the whole arc of a file himself, not one technique within it. A single matter can move from licensed databases 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 with only one of those done. Behind him are more than 45 years of the firm's accumulated sources, proprietary local data, and 38,000+ completed assignments.
He is also a software developer and works on the investigative software NWISI builds for its own use. The firm's reporting system checks every report against the house standards before it can go out: no "verified" status on a commercial database hit, no equity figure without the gross-value caveat, no negative finding without a list of what was searched. Its evidence-capture tool timestamps every exhibit and refuses to file a screenshot of an error page as proof. The result is findings that hold up when opposing counsel reads them line by line.
“Unveiling assets and accounts thought to be hidden makes debtors come to the table.”
Forensic Interviewing & Mitigation · Northwest Investigative Services
Dr. Shane Harrington leads forensic interviewing and mitigation work. He holds a PhD in psychology, with an emphasis in health psychology and investigative research, and an MBA. Few licensed investigators in Washington have that academic background, and he uses it in practice rather than as a credential on the wall. His post-doctoral focus is investigative psychology and forensic victimology: why people report what they report, how memory and trauma shape an account, and how to interview so that what comes back is reliable.
On civil files, that means witness interviews and recorded statements that stand up when the witness is later deposed. For attorneys in criminal matters, he works at any stage, from pre-charge through post-conviction: locating and interviewing witnesses, re-examining the evidence, and building mitigation that documents a client's history, including trauma, mental health, and circumstance, and presents it clearly to prosecutors, judges, and juries.
He has worked as an investigative researcher and consultant since 2001. Before that he was a licensed EMT and spent six years as a Basic Life Support instructor for a regional hospital. That medical grounding still helps on cases involving injury, medical records, or mental health.
Device Forensics & Cyber Intelligence · Northwest Investigative Services
Kyeson Utley leads device forensics and cyber intelligence. For attorneys in civil and criminal matters, he examines phones, computers, and accounts across multiple devices and reports what the data shows, what it doesn't, and how it was obtained. When a debtor's assets have moved on-chain, he traces where the funds went, in what amounts, and to whom, and writes it up as a trace report that can support a motion, a subpoena to an exchange, or a referral to law enforcement. He has done this work for law firms, law enforcement agencies, and high-net-worth clients, including tracing the funds through to identifying the people behind them.
He covers the rest of the digital side of a matter too: OSINT reporting and digital footprint tracing, darknet analysis, and threat management. On the defensive side he runs authorized penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, and social engineering engagements, and he does OSINT exposure reduction for clients who need their own footprint smaller. He also does due diligence on crypto ventures and their principals, including research into federal civil litigation and SEC enforcement history.
He has been CEO of an international private intelligence agency, where he built and directed its blockchain forensics program, as well as director of cyber operations for an investigative firm and CIO of a security services company. He is the founder of Ghostkey Development, a privacy-first software and security firm, and he speaks to the legal investigation community.
Field Operations · Northwest Investigative Services
The field team does the work that has to happen in person: surveillance, service of process, and documenting people, places, and property. Their names and photographs are deliberately left off this website. People who are watched or served sometimes go looking for the investigator, and field work is only effective when the person doing it can't be recognized.
Surveillance is used to confirm activity, residence, employment, or a claimed limitation, and is documented with time-stamped video, photographs, and written logs. Service of process runs on top of our own skip tracing, so a bad address gets corrected rather than returned. When service can't be made, we provide a diligence affidavit that records every attempt.
Every member of the team is a licensed investigator, and every file is supervised by one of the investigators named on this page, who can sign a declaration if the matter needs one.
The experts above are who you talk to. They are 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.
Every file still has one named investigator accountable for it, and that is the person who signs a declaration if the matter needs one.
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