The investigation starting point every insolvency practitioner needs

It's Monday morning. You've just been appointed to a failed trading company. The directors claim the business was hit by market conditions beyond their control. Creditors are asking questions. You have 100 appointments this year, and the statutory deadlines for this one have already started counting down.

Before you can build a case about director conduct, investigate specific transactions, or trace assets, you face a more fundamental challenge: Where do you even start?

The information vacuum every IP faces 

Every new appointment begins the same way—with an information gap. You know the company name and the directors' names from the statutory filings, or may have more of a brief from the Official Receiver.

But what you really need to know isn't in in one place.

• What's the real history of these directors? Previous appointments, patterns of behaviour, track record across other businesses and tell-tale signs of phoenix-ing?
• Who are the connected parties? Business associates, family members, other companies in the group structure?
• Where might assets have gone? Property holdings, other business interests, relationships that suggest transaction routes?
• What are the red flags that tell you where to focus your limited investigation time?

Traditionally, building this picture means days of manual research—searching Companies House, business databases, media, and various other sources to piece together fragments of information to spot patterns and connections.

Why manual research struggles as a starting point

Most IPs develop their own research processes, but manual approaches have inherent limitations when you need to move fast:

• Time-intensive when speed is critical: Manually searching multiple sources and cross-referencing everything takes days. You need this intelligence on day one, not day three.
• Easy to miss non-obvious connections: A director's spouse with a different surname, a business associate who only appears in certain filings, an address connection that links seemingly unrelated entities—these patterns are hard to spot when looking at sources sequentially.
• Inconsistent coverage across cases: The quality of your starting intelligence depends on which team member does the research, how much time they have, and what sources they think to check.
• The confidence gap: Even after days of manual work, you're never quite certain you haven't missed something. The fundamental issue isn't that manual research is low quality—it's that it doesn't scale when you're managing multiple appointments simultaneously.

DeepDive: How AI lays out investigation data in minutes not days  

This is where AI-powered intelligence transforms the IP's starting point. Rather than spending days building background manually, you can have a comprehensive investigation foundation within minutes of appointment.

Natural language reports with full citations

The intelligence comes back as a structured report that saves time at the outset of an investigation:

• Personal background: Biography, residential history, professional background
• Business history: Complete appointment record with company outcomes, timelines, and patterns
• Known associates: Recurring connections across companies, addresses, and transactions
• Legal and compliance: Court cases, disqualifications, regulatory actions, adverse media
• Financial indicators: Property holdings, business interests, creditor relationships
• Connected entities: Narrative on relationships between directors, companies, and associates

Every statement in the report includes citations back to original sources. If you see "Director was previously appointed to ABC Limited which entered liquidation in 2019," you can click through to the source filing. This isn't AI speculation—it's intelligence extraction with full audit trail.

Interactive investigation through chatbot

Once you have the foundation report, you can drill into specific questions without waiting for additional research:

• "What assets does the director hold?"
• "Show me companies where this director served with his business partner"
• "Are there any county court judgments against the director?"
• "List known property transactions in the last three years"

The chatbot queries the full body of knowledge built during the initial investigation, with every response including source citations.

Court-ready documentation from day one

Everything IPs do ultimately has to stand up in court or regulatory review. DeepDive reports are structured with this requirement in mind:

• Every factual statement cites its original source
• Sources link directly to original documents or filings
• Timeline of events is clearly documented with dates and sources
• Full audit trail of what was searched and what was found

Getting started: see it in action

The best way to understand how DeepDive transforms your investigation starting point is to see it work on a real case. Choose a current appointment where you're still building background understanding—we'll run a full DeepDive investigation and show you the comprehensive intelligence that would have been available to you on day one.