About

I did not so much choose this profession as grow up inside it.

My father, Boris Guseynov (1947–2016), spent his working life on one question: how people behave when they have something to hide. He built a school around it and founded LieScan. What he taught was not how to operate equipment. It was how to think about a case — where a story stops holding together, which question is worth asking and which one destroys the enquiry, and when the honest answer is that this method will not help you at all.

I began practising in 2004 and co-founded LieScan with him the same year. He died in 2016. The approach I work with is his, carried forward and tested against another decade of cases.

What twenty years teaches you

That most enquiries are lost at the start. By the time someone calls a specialist, the incident has usually been discussed with half the office, the person under suspicion has been warned by a well-meaning colleague, and the useful ground has been trampled. A good part of the first conversation is establishing what is left to work with.

That people rarely lie the way films suggest. Most of what looks like guilt is the fear of being suspected. Telling those two apart is the professional skill — not spotting a twitch.

That a conclusion saying "probably involved" is useless to a manager. The result has to be usable: what happened, what it means, what remains unclear, and what I would not put my name to.

The SLOG method

Part of what I use is a method my father developed, later described in the professional literature under the name SLOG. Its practical value is this: it does not depend on the participant knowing details available only to the person involved. Which is why the situation everybody calls hopeless — the whole company has already discussed what happened, so what is there left to ask about — is in fact its most common starting point.

I do not publish the structure of the questionnaire or sample questions. Knowing them in advance does nothing for an honest participant and a great deal for a dishonest one.

Practice today

I run investigations and examinations in Russia, and work internationally on case strategy, expert review, training and advisory. Memberships and registrations are on the Credentials page, each with a link, so you can check them without taking my word for anything.

I work in Russian and English.

What you will not find on this site

Case studies. Every case I have worked on involves people who never agreed to appear in anyone's marketing, and an anonymised story is still perfectly recognisable to everyone who was in the room. I will describe how situations of a certain kind usually unfold. I will not tell you about someone's.