Once upon a time, three befriended researchers started brainstorming about possible joint projects. We shared a disciplinary background and overarching theoretical stances, namely critical and cultural criminology. Moreover, all three of us engaged in empirical work: Rita Faria was then working on research misconduct (see Faria, 2018), Yarin Eski researched port security (see Eski, 2016) and Olga Petintseva focused on discriminatory practices in youth justice (see Petintseva, 2018). Although these areas of research are rather divergent, we were all conducting interviews with people who can be considered as experts and who, by means of professional status, have acquired a certain power position. What we concluded after some time was that even though much of criminological research takes place in institutional settings, methodological tools on studying people who can be considered as experts or ‘elites’ are rather scarce. The existing methodological insights are often scattered across disciplines and study domains (such as communication, political and business studies, geography, see, e.g., Bogner et al., 2009; Harvey, 2010; Van Audenhove & Donders, 2019), rarely discussing criminological topics and sensitivities. While these methodological guides refer to ‘elite’ and/or ‘expert’ interviews, they do not explicitly address the peculiar issues that are deeply entrenched with the study domain of criminologists. Moreover, such methods are mainly discussed in research papers, which address quite specialized research experiences.