The Expert Podcast

So if you're involved in any kind of a legal case like a divorce, a probate case, a fraud, some type of due diligence—do you need to hire a private investigator or private investigative agency? Well, for ninety percent of cases that used to require a private investigator, you don't need that anymore. If you go back to the 1970s or 1980s, even into the 1990s, many cases that would have resulted in somebody hiring a private investigator don't need that anymore. Why is that? Well, a lot of the research that an investigator used to do—background checks, asset checks, activity checks—people can do themselves now online.

You can do a lot of the research that used to require an investigator license to get access to secret private databases or secret private records. Nowadays, you can go on Google and find out most of the things about another person that you need to get—ninety percent of it you can find. You can find assets, you can find bank accounts, you can find real estate, you can find vehicles, you can find activities, what businesses they are involved in. You can even do social media stalking and find out where they go, pictures of themselves—most of this is what a private investigator used to do in the 80s and 90s. In fact, most of the activities of a PI from 20 years ago is obsolete—you don't need it anymore.

Now, for some clients, you still want to hire an investigator just because you don't want to do the work. Right? In the same way that, you know, if your sink breaks and you want to hire an expert plumber to fix your plumbing, you can hire an expert investigator to do the work. But most of the work you could do yourself if you wanted to. You don't need an investigator to have to do it—it's a choice out of convenience. Even if you're involved in a court case and you need to get some records or information on the other party to find out their assets, to find out are they committing fraud, to find out are they involved with some illicit activity—you can find that out yourself. All this information is available online if you have the time.

A typical investigation might take 14 to 20 man hours of labor. If you're willing to put that in, you can save a lot of money and do this work yourself. Where does an investigator come in and where is it important? Few very specific narrow places. First of all, if you need to have the evidence signed off on by a third party—if you're putting your evidence in court and the court doesn't allow you to just bring in evidence that's not certified—now you might need a licensed investigator to give you a written report from an investigator to say, "Yeah, this is real evidence." Because if you do your own online research on Google or anywhere else and you just do a screenshot and print it out, you bring it to court—the court could say, "How do we know this is real? How do we know you didn't just make this up?" Some courts require that evidence be certified or be provided by a licensed investigator. But that's not very common—normally, you can certify your own records.

What about if you're going to do in-person observation, otherwise known as surveillance? Well, you can technically do your own surveillance. However, if you're monitoring the activities of another party that you're in a case against, you have to be very careful that your surveillance doesn't turn into stalking. If you're in a divorce case and you want to do surveillance on your spouse to make sure they're not cheating or they're not getting drunk or something like that, that's fine. But if you do it yourself and you get caught, they could say, "You're stalking me, you're harassing me, you're intimidating me," and you can get in trouble. So you might want to have a licensed third party that knows what the rules are, too. Surveillance doesn't mean they give you carte blanche to do anything you want—you have certain limits on doing that. A licensed investigator will know what those limits are.

What about requesting certain private information? There's some information that, when it's requested from the government agencies or financial institutions, right on the form it says: "What's the reason you're asking for this?" And one of the reasons is a licensed private investigator. And if you check that box and put your license number, you'll get the info. If you're not a licensed private investigator, you might not be able to get it, or you might have to have some other permissible use. Maybe if you have a court case or some other subpoena, you might be able to get it. But sometimes, certain information isn't generally available to a civilian, where a private investigator might get it.

But those exceptions aside, most of the activities that an investigator could do, you could do yourself. And all the instructions on how to do it, you can find online. This YouTube video is one of billions of videos that are out there that can give you instructions on how to do any kind of investigation. We even have resources on our website—consultations, training, instruction—that can help you do these kinds of investigations and save some money, especially for do-it-yourselfers or civilian cases.