A lot of cases come down to a single factual question. Was the claimant who says he can't lift a box at the job site swinging a hammer? Was the parent who's barred from the neighborhood parked outside the school? Was the defendant where he says he was, or somewhere he'd rather no one looked?
Location evidence can answer questions like these with real force. It can also blow up in your hands if you read it wrong — and the way people read it wrong is almost always the same. So here's the honest version, because the honest version is the one that survives.
A signal proves presence, never absence
This is the whole thing, and it's worth saying slowly.
A captured signal places a device at a location, at a time, with high confidence. That's a strong, affirmative fact. If the claimant's device was broadcasting from the boat ramp at 9:14 a.m. on a Tuesday he was supposedly bedridden, that's something you can build on.
The absence of a signal proves only that no signal was captured. It does not prove the subject was somewhere else. Phones get left at home. Batteries die. Location permissions get switched off. Apps go quiet. A hundred ordinary things produce a gap in the record, and not one of them means the person wasn't there.
So a report that says "the subject was not at work that morning" because there's no signal at the worksite is a report that gets taken apart on cross-examination — and deservedly. The defensible statement is narrower and stronger: no signal was captured placing the device at the worksite during this window. Same data. One version is an overreach a competent opponent will dismantle. The other is a fact that holds.
If you take one thing from this: presence evidence is a sword, not a shield. Use it to establish what was, not to prove what wasn't.
The device is not the person — say so
The second honest caveat: a signal places a device, not definitively a person. In practice the association is usually strong — people carry their own phones, and a pattern of life anchors a device to an individual with real confidence. But "usually strong" is not "proven," and the gap matters when someone's claim, custody, or liberty is on the line.
The right move isn't to hide that gap. It's to name it, and then show the work that closes it — the overnight anchoring, the pattern consistency, the corroboration — so the inference from device to person is visible and tested, not assumed. An honest report makes its own reasoning checkable.
PROVEN, INFERRED, OPEN
This is how we keep all of that straight, and it's the discipline I'll defend on a stand. Every meaningful claim in a Next 72 report carries one of three tags:
- PROVEN — directly supported by the captured signal record. The device was here, at this time, full stop.
- INFERRED — a reasonable conclusion drawn from the pattern, with the reasoning shown. Strong, but an inference, and labeled as one.
- OPEN — not established by the data on hand, with a documented path to confirm it — the subpoena, the record, the corroboration that would close it.
Nothing gets quietly promoted from inferred to proven because it would help the case. The calibration is the product. An adjuster, a defense attorney, or a judge can see exactly how far each claim reaches and how far it doesn't — which is precisely what lets them rely on the ones that reach all the way.
Why the honesty is the credibility
There's a temptation, especially when a client wants a particular answer, to round the findings up. Resist it. The investigator who states the limits of the evidence before opposing counsel does is the one a court believes. The one who overclaims hands the other side a gift: discredit the overreach, and the jury starts doubting everything else in the report, including the parts that were rock solid.
Calibrated honesty isn't a weakness in a location report. Under a Daubert challenge, it's the entire ballgame. A method that names its own uncertainty, shows its reasoning, and distinguishes what it proved from what it suspects is a method that holds up. That's not us being cautious for its own sake — it's us making sure the strong facts in your case don't get dragged down by a weak one nobody needed to claim.
The court decides what comes in. Our job is to hand you findings built to survive the fight on the way there.