When Sean Mulholland moved from New York City to Jacksonville in 1996 and opened a private investigation agency in a spare room at his home, he built the business by working almost exclusively for insurance companies and their claims adjusters.
As Mulholland marks his 21st anniversary in business and in Jacksonville this month, he said Mulholland Investigation and Security Consulting Inc.’s attorney client base has evolved to about 40 percent attorneys who need litigation support services, 45 percent working for claims adjusters and 15 percent other investigative work.
“When I started, there were 20 claims offices in Jacksonville, but then insurance companies started consolidating and the claims people left,” Mulholland said. “But the lawyers were still here.”
When the shift began accelerating about seven years ago, the agency was working mostly for the defense side, but in the past few years, litigation services for plaintiff’s attorneys have grown “exponentially,” he said.
“We’ve lost our reputation as defense only. In the past few years, our work has shifted to plaintiff’s attorneys. Personal injury attorneys generally move faster than insurance company attorneys and our client is whoever calls us first,” Mulholland said.
From sole practitioners to some of the largest law firms in the area, attorneys on both sides of a case have similar needs.
“The interesting thing about litigation support is that it’s information-gathering,” Mulholland said.
That can be traditional surveillance — the old-fashioned “stake out” or tracking down and interviewing witnesses — or more likely these days, using technology to investigate people and companies that use technology.
The information revolution that began decades ago with the advent of personal computers has greatly expanded with the nearly universal business and personal use of mobile devices.
Mulholland said one of the fastest-growing segments of his litigation services business is analysis of social media.
In addition to collecting and analyzing the content posted on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the platforms collect other data that can be valuable to an attorney developing a case.
“Twitter leaves a trail of where you’ve been and even phone calls have geolocation,” Mulholland said.
Another service that’s growing is helping attorneys and law firms protect their business and client data from cyberattack, including ransomware.
That’s when a criminal invades an attorney’s computer network by simply getting someone in the office to open an email that contains a file that denies access to the data until the victim pays a ransom, usually with online currency that can’t be traced.
“In the old days of paper files, you could lock up your file cabinets and lock up your office and you could sleep soundly. It’s not that way anymore,” Mulholland said.
The future of technology and litigation may be in the areas of artificial intelligence and “predictive modeling.” Mulholland said software is being developed that will sift through billions of bytes of data to detect the most subtle trends.
“The key is the amount of data that’s out there and how quickly it can be analyzed,” he said.
“The next step is being able to predict fraud or where and when the next slip and fall will happen — what day, what time and what aisle.”
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