I run a company – Decipher Investigative Intelligence – that has 26 employees. We work in homeland security and in financial services, but the vast majority of our clients are law firms. We provide data, such as pre-hire due diligence, that helps clients grow more purposefully and profitably. In light of our small size, you might be surprised to learn that we have an established partnership with Thomson Reuters (TR), one of the world’s leading providers of news and information-based tools to a wide variety of businesses. They have over 25,000 employees and are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The details of why they wanted to partner with us despite our small size are clear, but more interesting are the multiple benefits that this partnership has created – for Decipher, for TR, and for our professional community.

Because of the nature of our business, we have built a store of an enormous amount of data, and data of a very specific and unique nature. When a law firm or a company is preparing to make an offer to their next partner, board member, CEO, CFO, or General Counsel, they come to us to ensure they know everything they need to know about the person they are about to bring on board. We verify the information the candidate has reported, which, in the legal profession, is exhaustive, and we also look for anything that might not have come to the surface. It’s our job to crawl around, underneath, over, and in between the words and figure out what kind of person they are. Someone can disclose everything that you’ve asked them, but that’s not going to tell you whether they scream and yell at people in the office or do awful things to people after hours. Once we have gathered the information, which we have been doing for eight years now, we find ourselves with what turns out to be a very unique data set.