Private Investigators Editing and Proofreading Services

An investigator's report in a custody matter states that the subject was seen leaving a residence at 11:40 p.m. and that a neighbour confirmed he stays there most nights. In court, opposing counsel establishes that the neighbour was never identified by name, was never asked to sign anything, and that the investigator's own note of the conversation was written from memory the following afternoon. The observation the investigator personally made was solid; it is discarded along with everything else because the report presented both at the same level.

We edit what private investigators produce — investigation reports and case summaries, surveillance logs and observation records, witness interview summaries and statements, skip trace and locate reports, due diligence and background investigation reports, service of process affidavits, licensing and insurance documentation, client engagement letters and scope agreements, and declarations and affidavits prepared for court filings. Our editors work on the report that has to hold up when someone reads it against the investigator under oath.

The investigation report is offered as evidence and tested by someone whose job is to discredit it, and its failure is a document that presents direct observation, hearsay and inference in a single undifferentiated narrative. We work through these so what the investigator personally observed is set apart from what someone else said and from what the investigator concluded, since a report that presents all three in the same voice invites the whole of it to be discounted along with its weakest element; so each observation carries the time it was made and the time it was recorded, given that a note written from memory the next afternoon is a different quality of evidence than one made contemporaneously, and the difference will be established by someone else if the report does not state it; so any third party is identified specifically enough to be located and asked, because a report resting on an unnamed neighbour has introduced a claim nobody can test and given opposing counsel a free point; so the investigator's vantage point and the conditions are recorded — distance, lighting, obstruction, whether the identification was of a face or of a vehicle — since an identification at night at sixty metres is a different assertion than one at ten metres in daylight; and so the gaps in surveillance are stated as gaps, given that a log implying continuous coverage it did not have is a misrepresentation an opponent only has to demonstrate once. Reports written this way keep the strong parts when the weak parts are attacked.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including case files, client matters and investigative records. We are editors rather than investigators, lawyers or evidence specialists, and we offer no view on investigative methods, findings or admissibility. What we can do is make sure a solid observation is not discarded along with a weak one.