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The First Days Decide It: What Executives Should Know About Cross-Border Investigations – Part 1
A report reaches the general counsel from a subsidiary in one country. The relevant emails sit on servers in a second. The key witnesses work in a third, and a regulator in a fourth has started asking questions. Each location has its own rules on privacy, employment, privilege, and what data can leave the building. The company needs answers quickly, and those answers have to hold up before regulators, courts, and the board.
That is the working reality of a cross-border corporate investigation. And the clock starts sooner than most people think. Authorities in the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa increasingly share information and move in parallel, and they expect companies to move just as quickly. In the United States, the first declination under DOJ’s new department wide corporate enforcement policy, released in March 2026, went to Balt SAS, a French medical device company, in an FCPA matter, and DOJ noted that the company self-disclosed while its internal investigation was still under way. How a company collects evidence, and who it engages to do it, in the first days of a matter can shape how every authority views its cooperation.
Companies that come through these matters well tend to get a few things right from the start, and one of the first is choosing the right investigative partner. That choice often decides whether a company is driving the facts or reacting to them.
Key Factors in Selecting an International Investigation Firm
Most firms can describe a global footprint. The more useful question for the C-suite and/or outside counsel is how that footprint performs when a matter is live, the clock is running, and three regulators want consistent facts. We encourage executives and their legal and compliance teams to test six areas.
- Speed and the ability to deploy. Can the firm put experienced investigators on the ground in a new country within days, not weeks, and keep adjusting as the facts change? In a live matter, the first two weeks often set the direction for everything that follows.
- Trusted sources and relationships. Investigators must have the ability to operate effectively wherever the facts are, built on decades of relationships in the private sector and with former foreign law enforcement and intelligence counterparts they have worked cases with. Those relationships open doors quickly and help a team get to the facts faster.
- Investigative experience and credibility. Team members who have run investigations themselves, with backgrounds in federal law enforcement, prosecution, and intelligence analysis, including people who have worked cases on the ground overseas. They know how findings will be tested by the authorities that receive them.
- Forensic capability. Collection, imaging, and analysis that produce evidence a court or regulator will accept, along with forensic accountants who can follow the money across entities and borders.
- Familiarity with data protection, labor, and secrecy rules, and a track record of working through them with counsel from day one, so that the investigation does not create a second problem.
- A strong working relationship with outside counsel. The best investigations run as one team, with counsel and investigators in constant contact, aligned on strategy, and working in a way that protects privilege. Making that relationship work under pressure takes experience, so ask how a firm has done it on past cases. Independence matters too, especially when findings will go to regulators.
Ask any firm you are considering for specific examples of matters in the countries involved, and for the names of the people who would do the work. In our experience, that conversation tells you more than any capabilities deck. Ask, too, who will actually be on the ground in week one, and how they will keep you informed. That person should be able to report back in close to real time on how witnesses are coming across, what new leads are surfacing, and the curveballs that inevitably come, so the client, counsel, and investigators stay in lockstep. The right partner can show you how it works, document what it did, and explain every decision to someone who was not in the room.
Why Guidepost Solutions for Cross-Border Investigations
Guidepost has been ranked on the GIR 100 for investigations consultancies for six consecutive years, from 2020 through 2025. Our more than 300 professionals include former federal agents, prosecutors, forensic accountants, and intelligence analysts. Across their careers, they have conducted investigations in more than 100 countries. For the C-suite, that means a partner who can get moving quickly, work as one team with outside counsel, and produce findings that stand up to scrutiny. The best time to have that conversation is before the first collection begins.
Coming in Part 2: Choosing the right partner is the first decision. The next decisions come quickly. In Part 2, we look at what happens once the matter is live: how to handle privacy and legal rules that conflict across jurisdictions, how to coordinate one investigation across many countries, and how to protect the integrity of the evidence so the findings hold up wherever they’re tested.
MSU Institutional Assessment + RAMAGELLAN MonitorshipEmpire/Liberty Review