NALI Annual Conference 2025

Rich Robertson, CLI

Title: There is a Database for Everything

Legal investigators need to look beyond what the courts and agencies put on their websites or the individual reports you obtain through discovery or records requests. The data behind those websites are also public records and they are gold mines. Developing a database mindset will expand your investigations.
 

Rich Robertson, CLI, has been a legal investigator and owner of R3 Investigations for nearly 25 years.  He and his team have investigated hundreds of complex criminal, civil cases, and business cases, including numerous death penalty cases at the trial, sentencing, and post-conviction levels.

He has been the editor of The Legal Investigator for 20 years. He became a CLI in 2012.

He was honored in 2017 by Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice – the criminal defense bar – with the John J. Flynn Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the only non-attorney in the organization’s 38-year history to receive its highest award.

The Arizona Justice Project honored him with its “One Injustice Award” in 2023.

Mr. Robertson served on the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s Private Investigator & Security Guard Hearing Board, which deals with licensing and regulatory matters. He was appointed to a five-year term in 2016 and was chairman from 2019 to 2021.

He is a former president of the Arizona Association of Licensed Private Investigators and recently became chairman of NCISS’s government affairs and legislative committee.

Previously, Mr. Robertson was a print and broadcast journalist in Arizona for 28 years, including two decades with The Arizona Republic, where he was on the investigative team, and city editor. He was the editor of three Republic investigative projects that were finalists for Pulitzer Prizes. He was also an Emmy Award-winning on-air investigative reporter for KPHO-TV and KPNX-TV.