Stephen learned how to investigate not in law school, but before - when he was a reporter – and after – when he was investigating cases on the job.  As a journalist, he spent years interviewing people, trying to interview people, staking out buildings and homes, poring through documents, and analyzing data – and then explaining what he had learned to strangers.  As a young lawyer, he worked closely with some great former prosecutors on some intense and complicated matters.

Over the years, Stephen wished that there were resources or guides that he could provide colleagues or other lawyers so that they could be better at investigating. And then he read the Sherlock Holmes stories and realized that the great detective felt the same way (or at least his author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did). Holmes had other lessons for investigators that are scattered throughout the stories, lessons that Stephen has shared in a webinar for the Federal Bar Association.  Compiling these lessons was Holmes’ dream: “to devote my declining years to the composition of a text-book which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.”

Holmes may not have gotten around to writing this textbook, but Stephen is trying to do so one article at a time.  Think of this as a quasi-sequel to the book that Sherlock Holmes would have written if he were real, sharing thoughts about investigative techniques and strategies using real-life and fictional examples.