Private Investgator Los Angeles and San Francisco

About Parrent Smith Investigations

Parrent Smith Investigations & Research is a full service private investigation firm providing results oriented investigative services to the legal and business communities.

We bring 75 years of collective experience to our clients' cases and provide individual consultation and supervision by either Nic Smith or Joanne Parrent on all cases.

We strive to solve our clients' problems without excessive fees. We provide proposals and cost estimates on all cases.

Our legal clients include some of the largest firms in California. In addition to the legal community, we have provided investigative services to corporations, financial institutions, insurance companies and consumers worldwide.

We use the latest database and information systems to enhance the investigative process. Please allow us the opportunity to discuss your specific needs with you. For a free consultation, please call or email us at either our Southern or Northern California office.

Free Advice about Private Investigations

Do you have a question for a private investigator? Are you curious about what we can do? About the law regarding a particular investigative issue? About how to separate the professionals from the hacks? We are happy to answer your questions and will post the answers for others, if the questions aren't private. There is no question that isn't worth answering, so please don't hesitate to send us an email..

To ask Nic Smith or Joanne Parrent a question about Private Investigations, click on the name below:

Nic Smith

Joanne Parrent

Please indicate if your question is private. Otherwise we will post it and our answer on the Q & A page on this site.

We look forward to helping you understand what private investigators can and cannot do and how we may help you solve problems.

Law Firm and Group Presentations by Parrent Smith investigations

Nic Smith and Joanne Parrent are experienced speakers who have presented many informative programs to law firms and associations. Three of their popular presentations include:

How to Legally and Effectively Use Private Investigators - In the wake of the HP and Pellicano scandals, how to determine if an investigator is using legal and ethical means to handle your case.
Creative Uses of Investigators in Litigation - An interactive seminar on how private investigator's think and approach cases
Show Me the Money - The tricks of the trade in asset investigations

For more information on these and other presentations, please email or call either our Southern or Northern California office.

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Investigative Notes:

Locating Anonymous Emailers

In today’s electronic age, email has supplanted snail mail. In 2012, the average number of business emails sent and received per day, worldwide, totaled 89 billion. So, locating anonymous emailers has become important in a variety of matters that clients come to us about. A couple of examples:

A business owner client receives an “anonymous” email stating that a particular employee is stealing from the company. The business needs to find out if there is truth to the allegation. To do that, we must first discover who actually sent the email.
In a family law matter, a client engaged in a custody battle receives an anonymous email claiming the parent on the other side is using drugs. To find out the truth, again, we need to find out who actually sent the email.

How do we do that? In the days when “snail mail” was the norm, if you wanted to know where a letter came from, you looked at the postmark on the envelope and could tell what city the letter was mailed from. From there, you could attempt to identify who might have sent it. If you want to know where an email has come from, the “postmark” you first need to find is the IP (internet protocol) address associated with the email.

At Parrent Smith we use state-of-the-art IP identification software find out the true IP address of the email. There are ways that an IP address can be concealed or mislabeled, and, if the emailer is technically sophisticated and has gone to great lengths to disguise themselves, we might not always be able to discover the correct IP address, but in most cases we can. Once we have the correct IP address, we can, through additional investigation, usually find out the identity of the person using that IP address and thus unlock the identity of the anonymous emailer. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a case where you need to find an anonymous emailer.