Adam Investigations Counsel – Three Luggage Tag Stamp Studies
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world organizations.
A July study.
Adam Investigations Counsel is a boutique law firm in Southern California that does one thing: impartial workplace investigations. When a private employer or a public agency faces a sensitive allegation – a discrimination claim, a whistleblower complaint and so on – the firm is brought in to establish what actually happened and to write a report reasoned clearly enough to withstand court scrutiny. Founder Aisha Shelton Adam has conducted more than a hundred investigations and holds training in trauma-informed questioning. Senior investigator Jane Tanimura, who once served as Senior Counsel at California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, writes in her firm biography about curiosity for people's stories and about connection with witnesses. The work is discreet and deliberate, and it moves around.
That last part is what caught us. An investigator's calendar is a travel calendar: site visits and witness interviews, a hearing in one county and a training in another. Somewhere in that shuffle a checked bag needs claiming, and a small piece of leather does quiet daily service on its handle. A luggage tag is a modest, useful thing, seen mostly by the person who carries it, which makes it close to the perfect object for this kind of practice. It also hands a stamp designer an unusually good brief, because investigation runs on actions everyone already recognizes.
The leathers and the press
All three designs are rendered on our luggage tags in country gray and in blueberry, with black as the third leather. Gray belongs to the paper-and-file world an investigator actually inhabits; blueberry reads as calm institutional judgment. On the colored leathers each mark is blind-debossed, pressed dry into the grain with no ink at all, the finish we keep coming back to for professional work because it whispers. Black carries the same die in gold foil, the one tag in the set allowed to gleam. The firm's own logo appears nowhere in these studies; every image below is built from the plain mechanics of investigation. One idea per die.
Two Accounts
Two speech bubbles sit above a clipboard, and on the clipboard a single box is checked. Anyone who has ever filed a complaint, or answered one, understands the picture in a second: two people told different stories, and someone wrote a reasoned finding after hearing both. That is a workplace investigation reduced to its skeleton. The firm's emphasis on clear, defensible reports gave us the checkmark; the bubbles are the part that happens first, and the part Jane Tanimura's biography dwells on – the listening.
Checked Fact
A magnifying glass enlarges one checked box on a short list. The magnifier is the oldest shorthand for looking closely, and here it hovers over the least glamorous object in any office, a checklist. The pairing is deliberate. Adam Investigations Counsel is retained because its findings may one day be read aloud in court, so each fact gets examined at full size before it earns its check. We tried grander imagery for this idea and kept returning to the humble list; it is what careful review actually looks like.
Interview Table
Two empty chairs face one another across a bare table. This is the room where the firm's work happens – the interview – drawn a moment before anyone enters it. The chairs are empty on purpose. An investigation into harassment or retaliation involves real people at a hard moment, and Aisha Shelton Adam's trauma-informed training suggested restraint: show the setting, never the witness. Of the three dies this one is the quietest, and on the country gray tag it is our favorite of the set.
Tags like these tend to find their own occasions. A firm milestone or a holiday, a new colleague or a longtime referral partner who keeps sending the hard cases – a small stamped object suits any of them, provided the ethics rules of the recipient's world permit a modest gift. That caveat matters in this field, and we like the firm more for knowing it would check.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Adam Investigations Counsel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.