ADMISSIBILITY OF EVIDENCE

When a missing person needs to be traced or surveillance work needs to be done, the attorneys call a Private Investigator to do the job. These are the men who often work under cover to find important facts to be used as evidence in court and the Private Investigator testifies in court with this information about fraud or other illegal actions.

Therefore, anything a private investigator sees/documents is admissible evidence in court. However, PIs are not obligated by law (as law enforcement IS obligated by law) to reveal their observations or seizures to the other side. For example, in one of our cases, we were lawfully in our client’s estranged wife’s residence when we documented extensive drug use and manufacture. We photographed the scene and our client’s attorney used these photographs to obtain sole custody for our client’s son. What if the estranged wife’s attorney had caught wind of this evidence and subpoenaed us to turn over this documentation? We would have used the work-product doctrine (which has nothing to do with 4th amendment protection and has everything to do with attorney-client privleges) to bar the revelation of the documents and our testimony. However, this is an empty hypothetical because the other side had no interest in seeing damning evidence.