How this directory is organised
There are twelve practice areas on this site and two ways of cutting them. The first is by category: consulting work, which is advisory or project work undertaken directly with a business, and expert witness and investigative work, which is retained through counsel and produces a written opinion rather than a set of recommendations. That split is real and it changes almost everything about how an engagement runs — who the client is, what can be discussed before a conflicts check, what the deliverable looks like, and who ultimately reads it.
The second cut is by discipline: search, domain names, and legal and investigative work. That grouping reflects where the underlying expertise comes from rather than who is paying for it, and it is the more useful one if you are trying to work out whether a particular question is one I can help with. The technical analysis behind a domain name expert witness opinion is the same analysis behind a domain background check; the difference is the standard it has to survive and the audience it is written for.
The answer-first field: engagement posture
Every practice area on this site leads with a posture, stated as a coloured pill before a word of prose and repeated as a chip on every card and a column in the index tables. It answers the first question anyone actually has, which is not "what is this" but "what shape of work is this".
Advisory means ongoing work with no fixed endpoint — technical SEO, search engine marketing, domain name strategy, reputation work. The value compounds and the engagement is judged on a trend rather than a delivery date.
Project means a defined scope with a deliverable and an end: a migration, a recovery, an investigation. There is a thing that has to be true when it finishes, and everyone can tell whether it is.
Testimony means retained through counsel, subject to a conflicts check, producing a written analysis and opinion that has to survive scrutiny by somebody paid to take it apart.
Those three are not tiers and they are not a price ladder. They describe how the work is structured, and confusing them is the most common reason an engagement starts badly. A migration run as ongoing advisory drifts. An advisory relationship run as a project ends the week the report lands, which is exactly when the useful part would have started.
What connects a search practice to a domain practice
People sometimes treat the domain name half of my work as a hobby that grew alongside the search half. It is the same subject seen from the infrastructure side. A domain is the identity a search engine attaches everything else to: the history of the name, its extension, its registration record and its DNS all sit underneath every ranking signal a site accumulates. I bought my first domain name in 1996, the same year I started practicing SEO, and sold it to a competitor two years later — which taught me faster than any amount of reading that the name is an asset with a market, a chain of custody and a set of failure modes all its own.
That overlap is also why the legal work exists. Disputes about search and disputes about domain names arrive at the same evidentiary problem from different directions: what can be established, from records that were made at the time, about a system that nobody in the courtroom operates.
Reading a practice area page
Each page states the posture first, then explains what the work actually involves, how it is done, what it typically requires from the client or from counsel, and where it commonly goes wrong. The quick-facts panel names the discipline, the engagement shape and the inputs the work depends on. The frequently asked questions at the end are the questions I am genuinely asked, answered at the length they deserve rather than in a sentence.
None of these pages sell anything. This site is a record of a practice; it does not publish rates, take briefs or accept engagements. Consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting, and stolen domain recovery and domain background checks go to DNAccess.
What is deliberately absent
There is no pricing on these pages, no comparison table ranking me against anyone else, and no client logo wall. The first is absent because rates are a function of scope and publishing a number invites people to buy the number rather than the work. The second is absent because a self-published ranking is worth precisely nothing. The third is absent because a great deal of the work described here — the expert witness material in particular — is confidential, and a logo wall assembled from only the disclosable half of a practice misrepresents the whole of it.
There is also no count of engagements anywhere on this site. A figure circulates online claiming a specific number of expert witness matters; it comes from a single aggregator page of unknown provenance, I did not put it there, and I am not going to repeat a number I cannot source. The same discipline applies to the one number that is mine: the domain names recovered through DNProtect is my own figure, and it is written as mine wherever it appears.