Private Investigator = Sherlock Holmes?
Thanks to books, movies and TV shows, many people have a clear mental image of the stereotypical private investigator. He works from a dimly-lit untidy office. There, he greets his clients, mostly with his silhouette. Usually, his job is either to find proof of wrongdoing then rectify the situation.
Well, that’s in the fiction.
In actual life, private investigators are people who are paid to gather facts. They are citizen with no law enforcement power. But they do have certain skill set that allows them to collect information while most people and even amateur ‘investigators’ fail to do so.
To do this, he gets useful information from witnesses and bystanders, skilful with hint but not illegally with false pretenses and fake identification. He does tail witnesses, takes pictures, searches buildings and keeps an eye out for clues that others may have overlooked.
A professional investigator must not achieve the goal by illegal means, that also safeguard the interest of the clients. He only takes cases that are ethical and possible to solve. He should work out a plan and budget for gathering the necessary information. The information he gathered must be submersible to Court (therefore must be by legal and ethnical means). He should analyze the evidence and present a report to the client with findings and not speculations.
If the investigator you hired did not do the analysis and planning, or even suggesting he could use pretense, search government and bank database. There are only two ways out,
1. You have taken a risk of criminal responsibility. (Please spare me quoting case law)
2. He will be charging you without doing anything.
Of course there is a third possibility, a combination of 1 and 2.