Services:
* Asset Location and Recovery
* Background Investigations
* Business Information
* Competitive Intelligence
* Criminal Defense
* Due Diligence
* Electronic Counter-measures
* Environmental Research
* Environmental Toxic Tort
* Fraud Investigations
* Intellectual Property
* Internal Corporate Investigations
* Litigation Support
* Public Records Research
* Security Consulting
* Skip Tracing
* Surveillance
* Undercover Investigations
* Witness Interviews
Credentials:
California Licensed Private Investigators (Nichols J. Smith, CPP CA Lic # 5617 & Joanne Parrent CA Lic. # 24108), World Association of Detectives, Professional Investigators of California, California Association of Licensed Investigators, American Society for Industrial Security, Association of Former Intelligence Officers , American College of Forensic Examiners
About Our Company
Parrent Smith Investigations is a full service private investigation and research 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 Orange County or Los Angeles office.
Areas of Practice
In the Environmental field, the investigative team at Parrent Smith Investigations is uniquely qualified for the major undertaking of conducting and managing background investigations in large toxic tort litigation, often with thousands of plaintiffs. Nic Smith has years of experience in handling the issues that are typically presented in these mass toxic tort cases. His agency was the lead investigative agency in the Stringfellow case in the 1990s, which at that time was the largest toxic tort ever, with over 3800 plaintiffs. More recently, both Parrent and Smith were the lead investigators in the San Gabriel Valley Groundwater toxic tort, with more than 1200 plaintiffs. In both cases, we were able to provide information and evidence that led to the settlement of many of the cases for greatly reduced dollar amounts.
Environmental cases also generally involve finding answers to not simply scientific but also historical questions, such as:
* What parties were located on the site and for what time periods?
* What parties may have contaminated the site and when and how?
* What neighboring companies may have caused contamination in the area?
* Did any party doing damage to the site contract with the government?
* What clean-up efforts, if any, were done by each party and what impact did those activities have?
* What were the common environmental practices regarding each contaminant at the time the property was damaged?
Finding the answers to these types of questions and weaving those answers into a chronological narrative story of the land use of a particular site is another specialty of Parrent Smith Investigatons. With investigators who have backgrounds in not only environmental cases, but specifically in historical research and writing, our clients can expect to receive a thoroughly researched and well-written narrative report on a site’s history from the time it was simply unused raw land to the present, or for whatever time period the case requires.
