Interview with a private investigator/firm owner

What do you do for a living?
I’m a private Investigator.
How would you describe what you do?
Our slogan or motto is, “The right information for the right decision.” Basically, we try to discover and present truth in any situation that we deal with.
What does your work entail?
People have a tendency to think that the only thing a private investigator does is domestics, you know, who’s running around with who. That’s maybe 10% of what we do. We do witness locates, witness interviews, gather information and talk to people in criminal defense cases. The state always has a prosecuting attorney out there to represent the state or the city. The accused doesn’t have anybody, they go out and hire an attorney and an attorney often needs an investigator, that’s where we come in.
You can’t just take one person and follow another person. It’s impossible. I was listening to a program the other night kind of like 48 Hours—it has to do with law enforcement investigations and so forth…this was an experienced law enforcement agency that said in this particular case, it took 8 people to follow one person. To do it right to, do it well, and be effective that’s probably about right.
We do work criminal defense cases, we work child custody, we locate people either for attorneys or for companies. We’ve looked for adoptive parents. An individual knows that they were adopted and would like to know a little know more information, or meet their adoptive parent. We’ll try to locate those people. We serve legal process, we do background checks, we may do surveillance for businesses in order to determine actual customer traffic compared to what a given business may be reporting. One I can think of is a business that was involved in automotive repair and the franchise—the franchisee or the franchisor—believed that the reported numbers on Saturday were below what they should have been, so we conducted two days worth of surveillance using video just to count the number of cars that went in and out of the bay doors that were being worked on and provided that to them and they worked their numbers from there. We help with what we call “due diligence,” which is if someone is getting ready to enter into a business arrangement with a party. One may have questions about the other as far as their reputation, their history, things of that nature—have they ever been involved in any bad dealings in the past—so we help them with that. We’re getting more and more calls that have to do with “My sister or someone I know has met somebody online" and they’re wanting to know more about that person before the sister takes off with the guy. We also do trademark infringement and patent infringement cases. It’s pretty broad. Continue Reading …
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