Episode 3: Conversation with Doug Kouns (Investigating the Wreck)

Doug Kouns:

On the Boston marathon bombing, the businesses security cameras basically followed that subject all along the way to where he set the backpack down. And so we learned anytime you have any case like this, look for where the videos might be, or look for the people that might’ve had phones that videoed this. There’s a wealth of information out there if you look for it.

Host David Craig:

Not all investigators are created equally. And today we’re fortunate to be talking to one of the best, we are talking to Doug Kouns. Doug spent over 20 years with the FBI and he did criminal investigations, he also did counter-terrorism investigations. When he retired he built the company called Veracity and Veracity is full of other FBI agents or law enforcement people that are now in private investigation business. I’m attorney Dave Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless.

Host David Craig:

I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured, who have had a family member killed in semi rather big truck wreck for over 30 years. Following the wreck, their lives are chaos. Often they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. And each and every episode, I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck wreck cases. This is After the Crash. Well, thanks, Doug. I appreciate you for being on our podcast. This is Doug Kouns from Veracity and welcome.

Doug Kouns:

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Host David Craig:

One of my goals and doing these podcasts is to arm ordinary people with information, that will empower them so that they know what questions to ask, their lawyers, if they’re hiring a lawyer, if they’ve been in involved in an injury case. And typically what used to happen with somebody would be in an injury case, and they would hire a lawyer, and then they would just defer everything to the lawyer, and they would have no idea what the lawyer was doing. They didn’t know if the lawyer was doing a good job or a bad job. And I want to pull back the curtain and show people what we do. So that they can ask intelligent questions of their attorneys so that they can make sure that their case value is increased. And one of those areas is investigations. And so that’s what I wanted to speak with you about. But before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your personal background?

About Doug Kouns

Doug Kouns:

All right. Well, I’m from here in Indiana, a little town near Muncie. And grew up I went to Purdue at first and transferred and graduated from Ball State. I was a high school chemistry teacher for a couple of years. And then I had an opportunity become an FBI agent. And so I sat for the exam and passed that and then there’s a phase two exams and an interview and passed that apparently. Took about a year the whole process of applying and was off to the Academy in Quantico, Virginia and was an FBI agent for a little over 22 years. And my first office was Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And that was an interesting experience and I got my office of preference transfer back home in the early 2000. Worked in the Bloomington office for four or five years, and then took an assignment at headquarters using my chemistry background in the weapons of mass destruction chemical countermeasures unit.

Doug Kouns:

And then I got back to Indianapolis as a supervisor of the field intelligence group, which is a group solely dedicated to collecting intelligence on the bureaus high-priority programs counter-intelligence counter-terrorism and public corruption are the big three. Got to retirement age and we’re eligible to retire at 50, in the Bureau as long as we have at least 20 years. And so I hit the eligibility requirements and did the math and had been thinking about starting my own investigative firm. And that’s what I did.

Host David Craig:

And I think that it’s fascinating because, I can tell you that not all private investigators are equal, you have all different levels of training. And people can put out a shingle on their website and say “I’m a private investigator.” But not all private investigators certainly not as much training as you have, right?

Doug Kouns:

It would be difficult to do so I would say, I’ve had so many in-service trainings and the FBI Academy and the experiences invaluable they can only teach you so much. It’s not till you get out there doing it, that you learn the little tricks and what works for you. What works for somebody else may not work for me with my personality. I’m not a desk thumping “Tell me the truth right now,” kind of in NYPD blue cop, I’m more of a finesse and using more cerebral techniques to get people to come around to seeing that telling me the truth is the best option.

Host David Craig:

Obviously to do the type of investigations you were doing for the FBI. Those are major investigations, you’re working on the top projects that the government has. And so obviously you have to learn a skill set to do that. You have to be able to put the puzzles together, you got to find the evidence, put the evidence together, figure out where it leads, you have to be able to interview or interrogate folks, you have to, I assume, have some mastery of digital and know where to look, and how to look and have the people who know what to do and how to pull that information together. And so I would assume you have to do all those types of things. Wouldn’t you, as far as an FBI agent?

Doug Kouns:

Right. You needed to be able to do a little bit of everything and be really good at a few things. Talking to people is probably the biggest skill. And if it’s a subject interview I don’t do those anymore well, occasionally in the private world but in the Bureau, sometimes you’ve got somebody that you’re talking to that you want to tell the truth. And you may or may not have any evidence to support what you think happens. So your confession is the only thing that you might have. So it’s an utmost importance to not screw that up. You’ve got to read their body language, the way not what they say, but how they say it. Little changes of inflection, little non-verbals, involuntary reactions.

Doug Kouns:

Somebody was doing a pretty good job lying to me one time then all of a sudden their lip starts to quiver. It’s nothing they can control, but I picked up on it and I’m like, ” Something’s bothering this guy.” And you dig in your heels and you basically go circle it back around and you ask the same questions in a different way till you find that little discrepancy. And then you exploit that, you pin them into a corner and give them a pathway out, which isn’t the truth. And often they’ll even thank you for lifting that way to pop off their chest. And they’re glad to be on the path of putting it behind them and resolving whatever the issue was.

Host David Craig:

Well, and I’m sure as a supervisor with the FBI, you had the on occasion, put a team together of key people. And that’s not unlike what I do as an attorney. When I get involved or hire in a big case or a wrongful death or a semi case, the first thing I do is put a team together. And that team on reconstructionist, mechanics, private investigators, and a variety of different people. And I’m impressed with the team that you’ve put together there at Veracity.

Doug Kouns:

Thank you.

Host David Craig:

It’s a heck of a team. Tell us a little bit about your team?

Introduction to Veracity IIR

Doug Kouns:

So when I retired… And you’ve met my partner Kathy. Kathy and I have about the same amount of time in the Bureau, we reached retirement age about the same time, I floated this idea. And she was interested and I knew what quality work from working with her. She was on one of my teams. Not my last position with the Bureau. But the one before that she was on my special operations team, we did a lot of surveillance together and became good friends through that spending an awful lot of time out on the road, sitting in cars, drinking coffee, waiting for the bad guy to do something. So you get to know people real well in those situations. And she was willing to come along with me and we got our PI license and then started doing business. And it grew quicker than I expected and so we suddenly were needing help. And so I looked mainly for retired FBI agents that I had worked with that I knew something about that I knew had the work ethic and the quality of work that we were looking for with this firm.

Doug Kouns:

What we’re trying to do here is set ourselves a little bit of part with professionalism and thoroughness. And everything we do we model after how we used to do it with the Bureau. So the reports that you read, those look very similar to the reports that we would turn into the Bureau and we proofread. You’re very rarely going to find typos or cut and paste errors, no. We do make them but very rarely will you find big mistakes in our work. And we look under every rock and every corner under every couch and looking for those angles. So we got overwhelmed, I hired Paul, was our next hire and he was an FBI agent that I’d worked with in the past. And then Lori does most of our financial fraud cases. She’s a certified fraud examiner and also a CPA, so we give her… I’m also a certified fraud examiner and Paul is also a CPA. But Lori, that’s really her thing. She worked on the Bernie Madoff when she was an active agent.

Doug Kouns:

We’re up to seven or eight former FBI agents. We’ve got a retired postal inspector who I think you also had met. You sent him our way. Thanks for that. He’s been a great investigator. And we’ve got Jeff from the IMPD, he’s a very highly decorated detective. And then we’ve got an international investigator Jeremy who came from the United kingdom’s National Crime Agency. He came to us as a referral from the head of Lilly, Eli Lilly Security, who was a former FBI agent and he was high up in the management. He was an SAC, which is the head of a field office. That’s where we came up with this all-star team. We just added Tim green, who was the chief of police of Carmel for many years and he’s been fantastic. And we’re even getting ready to start an office in Lafayette. We’ve got a retired agent that was inquiring if we had any work for him we occasionally have a case up there, but I really haven’t tried to develop the market. So we’re looking forward to work in more up there.

Host David Craig:

Well, I think that’s fantastic. Ordinary folks that are trying to figure out, does my lawyer hiring the right investigators? There’s the question they wouldn’t even know where to start. And certainly one of the starting places is the qualifications of the people. And your whole team is well qualified and they have years of experience. Both you and your partner have over 20 years in the FBI. And how to interview you guys have worked on the highest profile cases. And so you know how to put the puzzle together to figure out what happened in a case. And so qualifications is his number one thing I would look at, what else do you think makes a good investigator?

What Makes a Good Investigator?

Doug Kouns:

And in my opinion, it’s being able to look at whatever the problem is from different perspectives other than your own. So when you take a case, we get one from you. I look at it and it’s human nature to quickly decide, “Okay, well, here’s what I think happened.” But you don’t know that, that’s what really happens. So you got to keep an open mind. And you’ve got to go talk to people without these preconceived conclusions. And let them talk and don’t tell them what their answers are, what they should be, let them tell you what their answers are. And sometimes they don’t remember, sometimes these cases come to us years later and they do remember them, they don’t think they can. We’re skilled at bringing that out by recreating that scene in their mind. And you can see them when you finally hit that play button and they’re remembering, “Oh yeah, the car, while on the right lane came over,” and they seem very pleased with themselves that they’ve been able to come up with that.

Doug Kouns:

So I think really there’s not a one size fit all, but being a great interviewer is the most important thing. You have to, in a short period of time, build enough rapport that person is going to talk to you. If they’re a reluctant witness, you have to look for signs of deception. And pick that up and overcome those hurdles as their eyes. You have to be tenacious too, you can’t give up sometimes you get a hard to find witness or they’re dodging you. And you can’t make a couple of phone calls and say, “Hey, we couldn’t find them.” You got to go knock on their doors at different hours. If they weren’t during the day, you got to go out at night and knock on the door 8:00, 9:00 PM. They might not be happy with you at first. But once you get to talk to them you overcome that hurdle and then you can get to the heart of what you’re there for and it’s usually it ends up a positive experience. We get what we’re looking for.

Doug Kouns:

So really people skills are as big as anything. We all have experience, we all have training. And so what sets my people apart is that they’re all very good with people and they know how to approach them and get what they need.

Host David Craig:

I think that in what you’re talking about as in-person. It’s hard to read somebody if you’re talking to them on the telephone, you don’t see that lip quiver. And so this day and age of technology there a lot of agents out there, a lot of private investigators at least who try to do everything from their desk, and their computers and their phones. And they’ve gotten out of the habit of going out and actually doing the legwork and getting out to see the people, and face the people, and look for other possible witnesses and those types of things. And so, how important do you think it is on a big case? And I work on multimillion-dollar cases often. And so I don’t want somebody on a computer screen. How important is it to do it face-to-face?

Doug Kouns:

The face-to-face stuff is very important. You just don’t build that rapport with a phone call. And first of all, they don’t even necessarily believe you are who you say you are. So that’s an additional hurdle to overcome. And it’s easy to not answer the phone people look, then I don’t know that number they don’t answer it. You’ll leave a message, they may or may not return it. Most people these days don’t return messages if they don’t know you. And oddly enough, I’ve had more success with texts, especially with young people, they prefer to text. But there’s no rapport building with that it’s usually miss type words with your thumbs. But when you show up in person, it’s hard to ignore you, you’re right there and they’re going to have to talk to you and you can overcome those hurdles a lot more easily when you’re in person.

Doug Kouns:

Lot of times people are interested in that we were FBI agents. And so, “Oh, you were an FBI.” Sometimes they don’t like that either so it’s a double-edged sword. Usually they’re interested in their attention and you bring up something non work-related, just like, “Oh, I like your whatever.” And again, a little icebreaker where I’ve seen some investigators just go, “Hi, I’m so-and-so, I’m here to talk to you about the crash. What did you see?” That’s not the way to go about it. And you got to put a little time and effort into it and enjoy it. We enjoy what we do. That’s part of what makes us good at it.

Host David Craig:

One thing, and I think that’s what that separates everybody. Attorneys who love what they’re doing, do a far better job at it than those who are doing it to make it make money or are the for living. And that’s true with you guys as well. I think that we call you guys and we’ve given you all different cases to work on. But if we get a semi-case, or a big case, or an automobile, or wrongful death or a brain injury or something significant. We call you guys and then that’s sets in motion a whole bunch of things. And I’d like to walk through for our audience a little bit about what type of things might be involved in a serious wreck. What type of things would a private investigator do for a law firm?

How Do Law Firms Utilize Private Investigators?

Doug Kouns:

Okay. So we’ll get usually an email from one of the paralegals that says what’s going on and sometimes a phone call, if it needs a little bit more explanation, certain angles that you’re looking to find out about that may not be apparent. But it takes a first review and figuring out what in general happened? Who are my witnesses? Who’s the subject? Who’s the victim? I’ll immediately send a note to our social media, our open source internet person that gets on and looks for all these witnesses, because people tend to take pictures with their phones these days and they tend to put them on social media and they tend to talk about them. And it was one of your cases that we worked, were there were probably half a dozen witnesses that we didn’t know about until we’d dug in, because we found the accident had been reported in the news and it was on their Facebook page.

Doug Kouns:

And so-and-so would say, “I was walking down the sidewalk when that happened. I saw the car pull right in front of her.” And so that wasn’t in the police report. And so there was a good interview that we tracked her down and got to get interview. So we’re going to exploit social media, any open source internet. If there’s any allegation of drugs or alcohol, we’re going to do a background investigation, see if they’ve got a history of that kind of thing. If it’s say a dog bite case, we might run them and see they’ve got 12 previous dog bite cases that gives you an idea that maybe this is something other than what they’re purporting it to be. They may have a relationship with the neighbor down the road that lets their dog bite them or something. So we prevent people from walking into things that are going to be money pits, that they aren’t going to win. Sometimes the answers, aren’t what you want to hear, but that’s what it is. And it helps you make better decisions.

Doug Kouns:

We’re going to go out to the scene, we’re going to take pictures, we’re going to look for obstructions for view if it’s an intersection and you can’t see around the big sign, that’s something that you might want to look at. There’s rules about where signs can be placed and every once in a while, they don’t conform. We’re going to look for businesses nearby that might have surveillance video that captured it that often happens when there’s a gas station nearby. A lot of people have ring doorbells these days. We’ll canvas the neighborhood and say, “First of all, did you see? Did you hear? And do you have a ring doorbell that might’ve captured this?” And every once in a while, we’ll get that, so get it all organized.

Doug Kouns:

We’ll go out and start doing interviews. Sometimes those interviews lead to more witnesses and evidence that we didn’t know about. And basically do a thorough investigation where we feel like we were comfortable, that we’ve uncovered every stone without going overboard. Your neighborhood canvas, you can take out four blocks, but that would be a waste of time. You try to get a few houses on either side of it and make sure you have a clear picture of what happened? Who saw what? And allow you to practice law and let us do the rest of it.

The Need for Speed: Security Cameras and Other Evidence Disappearing

Host David Craig:

Well, I think in one of the things you mentioned was security cameras and the doorbell camera. 30 years ago, or over 30 years ago when I started practicing, you didn’t have that. Now, I’m seeing that all over the place. There’s security cameras on pole barns out in the middle of nowhere, they’re on buildings, on houses, they got cameras in cars, they got cameras in there in semis. There is so much more cameras and security videos that are available. Are you seeing a lot of that as well?

Doug Kouns:

Oh, absolutely. And that’s something we picked up in the Bureau. And that evolved with my career. Back in the mid-’90s when I started doing this, nobody had cameras and very few people had. The cell phones might’ve had a rudimentary camera on it was nothing like we have today. I don’t know if you saw the movie Patriot Day about the Boston marathon bombing? The business’s security cameras basically followed that subject all along the way to where he set the backpack down. And so we learned, anytime you have any case, like this, look for where the videos might be, or look for the people that might’ve had phones that videoed this. There’s a wealth of information out there if you look for it.

Host David Craig:

And would you agree that some of that data can be lost, if you don’t move quick enough?

Doug Kouns:

Oh, yeah.

Host David Craig:

So one of the things about you guys, you guys are prompt and when we hire you and you guys are immediately on top of the case. But it’s important for the people who are looking to hire lawyer or hire an investigator to know that there’s some of that stuff is taped over or lost if you don’t move fast enough.

Doug Kouns:

Well, cloud storage is expensive, it adds up. So it depends on the business. We did one for you and we were two days too late. It had expired and not expired just that gas stations retention policy was one year period and then it started over writing. And we were there a year and two days later so it didn’t exist. And a year is a long time, most businesses only saved their video for like a month, if that. And sometimes they want some legal service, sometimes they want letterhead requesting it, it depends. But you’re right, if you don’t get on that quickly, it can be gone forever.

Host David Craig:

And I think that one of the mistakes that some lawyers make and investigators make is not getting out to the scene. You just talked about it not only are you looking for the security cameras or the obstructions, like you mentioned. But without going to the scene, how do you do a deposition down the road? How do what you’ve got? How do either good or bad? Like you said, as a lawyer, I just want the facts. I don’t care, I don’t want to be surprised years down the road. I want to know on the front end.

Doug Kouns:

Right. I was thinking about a case where with a bus, it was you guys were we found a closed page on Facebook, where several people were talking about how that bus had passed them going 75 miles an hour in a 55 mile per hour zone earlier before so they didn’t see the accident, but they saw factors leading up to it. And we’ll usually even call the investigating officer that’s on that police report. Because they’re in a hurry, they want to get the scene cleared. Often there’s more to it than what they might’ve put in their report. And you can get that out of them from doing a good interview of them as well. But yes, being efficient. We don’t sit on stuff. When we get a new case, it gets assigned. We start working on it and we get most of them done within what a month, easily few weeks sometimes

Host David Craig:

The problem is evidence can disappear. Videos, film can be canceled. Obviously some people hire us quick, some people don’t hire us for a year. We have no control over when people get hired. But once you are hired to at least in my opinion, it’s imperative that you get rolling as quickly as possible. Our Roadways can be repaved or redone, so you have a whole bunch of different things that could happen. That your case can be ruined by simply not getting out to the scene.

Why is it Important to Visit the Scene of the Wreck?

Doug Kouns:

Like some we learned from you guys, we learned stuff all the time. And on the back of street signs, there’s usually a date for when that sign was put there. And sometimes it wasn’t there when the accident happened. And you wouldn’t have known that if he didn’t visit the scene.

Host David Craig:

I remember trying a case down and I think it was Ripley County, Indiana. And I couldn’t figure out because the defendant was… I took his deposition and he appeared to be a good person. He was a veteran, he appeared to be telling the truth, but he swore that he didn’t see my client stopped at a stop sign. And when you own the roadway, it’s like, “Okay, well, there doesn’t appear to be any obstructions.” And so I sent my investigators out and at that time, this was years ago. But then I went to the scene and because the investigators came back said, “Look, there’re no obstructions. “I’m like, that doesn’t make sense, because I’ll either I’m really a bad judge of character and this guy’s lying, or he’s telling the truth and there’s just something we’re missing. And I went back to the scene and on a couple of different occasions, because sometimes things change. As you know you go a day versus going at night, you go at different times, you try to go back on the time of the wreck.

Host David Craig:

And what I found was that there was a neighborhood and there was a semi that would always sometimes personal live in this house. They would park their semi in a particular location that actually would have block the view as the defendant would have come around a curve. And so all of a sudden it made sense, he didn’t remember the semi, he just said, “I didn’t see her.” And luckily for me, the defense lawyer never went to the scene. And so we were able to win that case. But other times I’ve been at the scene when the defense lawyer pulls up in his car and we’re both there looking at it are both we’re private investigators. So it is important for more investigators like yourself and the lawyers to actually get out of their office and get out on the streets.

Doug Kouns:

We did one for you guys a few months ago. Where I had to do a little math because we went at the same time of day that the accident occurred, which was like Twilight but it was a different month. So we had to figure out where the sun would have been in relationship to the day that we went to take pictures on. So the equivalent of 7:00 PM on the day of this accident it would be basically the sunlight equivalent of 8:30 PM. And so we went and took pictures and there’s a big difference in that Twilight.

Doug Kouns:

And also to your point, the season matters in sometimes trees hang down and obscure a stop sign. And if it’s in the winter it doesn’t obscure it but if it’s in the summer and the leaves are in, it will. Or mowing crews been by recently there’s so many factors. You got to go to the scene this was no way around. People maybe get, I don’t know if it’s lazy, but just complacent. They think they can do an adequate job and maybe they can, but not always.

Host David Craig:

And I think sometimes the lawyers don’t want to invest the money. I see that where there’s some law firms who want to skimp on the front end in hopes that the case will settle down the road. The problem is if you don’t do that investigation in the beginning, it’s hard to put it back together a year later or two years later, three years later when the case is getting ready to go to trial. And all of a sudden you find out that the insurance company is not willing to pay you a fair settlement. Now, what are you going to do? Whereas I think with my experience is the good trial lawyers are putting their case together as if they’re going to go try on every case.

Doug Kouns:

Right? I think that’s true, the quicker you get on this the better. People’s memories start to fade, witnesses move, and then they become hard to find. Within weeks or months, is the best time to strike on these to interview people when the memory is fresh. We can bring a lot back, but it’s still better when it’s fresh and people haven’t moved. Half the battle sometimes is finding these guys. They’re sometimes a little bit transient or they job hop a lot and we ended up finding them in another state somewhere. And you can’t do that in person interview yourself. I can get out my retired FBI agent and ask them to go do the interview for me. But it’s not quite as good as when you are right there with them. And you have all that tacit knowledge about the investigation.

Finding and Communicating with Witnesses

Host David Craig:

That’s what your company has the ability to do as well is find witnesses. Sometimes key witnesses will disappear on you, you may even have a good statement from them. It takes you a couple of years to get the trial and those witnesses disappear, your company’s able to find them too, right?

Doug Kouns:

Right. You got to think out of the box on these. So sometimes you can’t find the person, but the technology that we have, the databases that we subscribe to. If I can’t find you, I’ll find somebody that knows you and they’ll probably know where you are. So Sunday, for one of your paralegals they couldn’t a witness that we already had a statement from and needed to get a hold of them. And even this is on the defense side the defense’s counsel, so they couldn’t find their own client. So I had him on the phone about 24 hours later because I couldn’t find him. But I found his older sister and had a nice conversation and she was agreeable to helping me. And she made a couple of phone calls and found out he was living with his sister in Florida and called down to her sister. And they put him on the phone and you got to dig your heels in and look.

Host David Craig:

It’s always amazing on the insurance companies can’t find their defendant. Usually they’re really bad. Awful convenient that they can’t find them. So I know another type of case that we’ve worked with you on, which are always fascinating is if sometimes there’s a wreck and you have to look for other culpable parties, other folks that might be responsible. And so sometimes it’s the intersection so sometimes there’s a wreck. And at an intersection. And those are always tricky because there may be a history there of other racks or whatever. And so walk us through, you’ve done those for us. What stuff do you do on those cases?

Doug Kouns:

So that was our first case with you guys was a dangerous intersection case. And basically going through the process, like I described before, looking at police reports and everything that’s been done previously. And then looking at that intersection from we’ve got, you can use Google maps or a satellite view, and we also have a drone you can get up and take a look at it from above. And the one I’m thinking of now, it was in such a way that the road curved off one-way. And at night, because it was poorly lit, it looked like the road coming this way was a continuation of the road that you were on before curved off. And so the one party thought she was going to continue straight on. And She was supposed to have occurred and ended up being a head-on collision unfortunately.

Doug Kouns:

So we got out and started doing the neighborhood canvas, knocking on the doors. And the second interview I did on that one, the man was talking about, “Oh, that’s always been a dangerous intersection. We had a neighborhood group that formed about this intersection because of the traffic that picked up when they put the church in right next door. And we took it to the County commissioner’s office and I was like, “Okay,” that’s a big element in a case like that, as they have to have full knowledge of the fact that, that’s a dangerous intersection you can’t have an accident and then nobody’s ever brought it to anyone’s attention that it was dangerous. They had clearly been advised that there was a problem and had clearly done nothing about it.

Host David Craig:

Well, I think that’s bringing everything to a conclusion. If people are out there and they’re trying to figure out how do I pick a good investigator? How do I know? What should I do if I’m an inexperienced and I’m a young lawyer, maybe a lawyer who’s trying to figure out who do I hire? What’s your advice to them?

Doug Kouns:

I would call and interview that investigator and see how they deal with you. Are they nervous talking to you? Everybody’s usually a little nervous they want your business and don’t want to screw it up. But what are their qualifications? What’s their experience? What other training have they been to? Is it someone you don’t want to be disrespectful to anybody but is it somebody that was a cop for a couple of years decided they didn’t like it. And now they got their private investigator. Well, that person doesn’t have a whole lot of training nor experience. So if you don’t do a little due diligence of your own, you can end up spending a lot of money and not getting the results that you need. I think our hourly rates probably a little bit more than our competition, but I would argue that we’re more efficient and more effective in the old adage, what you get what you pay for?

Host David Craig:

I couldn’t agree more. One last question I couldn’t go without asking. So how’s it feels to be a celebrity? I keep seeing you on television. So you’re getting interviewed a lot on television, on news?

Doug Kouns:

Yeah. The lady that we use to Meg, Megan Associates for our marketing, when we first started up gave us a connection with FOXNews. And we’ve become their go-to source for law enforcement expert on whatever the topic of the day is. That’s been a real good a win-win relationship, they get a news article and we get a little publicity. So we love that too.

Host David Craig:

I love seeing it. I’ll say to my wife “Hey, look, there’s Doug who we use. That’s the best private investigator I’ve ever worked with.” [crosstalk 00:37:35]

Doug Kouns:

Thank you for that.

Host David Craig:

So Doug thank you very much for coming on our podcast. And hopefully people will learn a little bit about how to use and how to pick a private investigator.

Doug Kouns:

Well, thank you for having me. And we’ll look forward to talking to you soon.

Host David Craig:

This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firms, please go to our website, ckflaw.com. Or if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-Ask-David. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck you pick up my book Semitruck Wreck: a guide for victims and their families. This is available on Amazon or you can download it for free on our website ckflaw.com.