Recording the details of your investigation forces you to challenge the truth as you present it on the page.
This article was excerpted from the second edition of Principles of Investigative Documentation, by Philip Becnel, Scott Krischke, and Alexandra Becnel.
Principles of Investigative Documentation
By Philip Becnel, Scott J. Krischke, & Alexandra K. Becnel.
Once, a client-attorney screamed at one of my investigators and called her report a “piece of shit!” What offended this attorney so much was that the report’s substance — research on an opposing party — proved unhelpful to his case.
An investigator has scant control over the content of their reports, only the presentation. I reviewed the report, deemed it exhibited solid investigative work, and emailed the attorney. I told him he could not scream or curse at my employees like that, and I withdrew from his case. He immediately called and begged me not to withdraw. Trial loomed, and us quitting would effectively doom his case. I agreed to stay on, provided he apologize to my investigator and pledge to treat my team with respect. Basically, I did not want to impact the attorney’s client, the litigant, because of the unprofessionalism of this one man.
As soon as we hung up, I wrote a memo to the file, documenting the interaction the attorney had with my investigator, my withdrawal, and my ultimate decision to stay on the case, conditioned on the attorney’s promise. Also, I explained my reasoning to the investigator, who kept working on the case through its conclusion. The attorney apologized and continued hiring us for his cases for another decade. He never insulted any of my investigators again.
When I say that I wrote a memo to the file, I mean I memorialized an event for the sole purpose of memorializing the event. This memo detailed the steps I took to protect my employee from a hostile work environment brought about by the client and my rationale for withdrawing, should the attorney not have kept his word. I never sent it to the client, the investigator, or anyone else. I just dropped it in a secure place, should it be needed later. The document preserved the truth of what occurred, for whatever purpose the truth may have served in the future.
“Making the ‘right’ decision further insulates me from bad consequences (usually), but it also feels good to know I painstakingly weighed my options.”
A memo to the file protects its author — that is its primary purpose — but it does more than that. We have written similar reports for other things, like employee misconduct and client behavior bordering on sexual harassment. It’s useful whenever there is an ethical quandary, like when a client’s interest conflicts with my duty as an employer to protect employees from assholes and perverts.
In such situations, one goal is surely to protect myself and my company from a lawsuit. However, I also want to do the right thing in those situations, and the right thing is not always an obvious path. When I write down what happened and explain my rationalization for a choice — to myself — I sometimes find that a different choice is warranted. Making the “right” decision further insulates me from bad consequences (usually), but it also feels good to know I painstakingly weighed my options.
If you take only one thing from the second edition of Principles of Investigative Documentation, take this: your reports are the most important things you will ever produce as an investigator. They are the primary, tangible work product of your entire case.
If you take a second thing from it, consider this: documentation is an integral part of an investigation, not a thing you do after an investigation.
And a third thing, a bit more epistemological: anguishing over your documentation shapes you into a more conscientious investigator.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” A report is like that, too. When you stare at a blank page and fill it with something, like details of the thing you are investigating, it will or should force you to challenge the truth as you present it on that page. This process mutates your investigative DNA.
For example, when it is plain from the page you forgot to ask a witness something, you are more apt to remember to ask it next time. Recognizing the mistake changes you. It makes you better. When you write a book, something similar happens. You start with a draft and then rewrite the thing repeatedly until you either love it or are too exhausted to write another word. This tedious process, in which you vacillate between conceit and doubt, will or should cause you to agonize over your claim as arbiter of the truth you present. I certainly agonized over every sentence of this book.
Jean-Paul Sartre described anguish as awareness of our own freedom, because with awareness of freedom comes responsibility. That sense of anguish you feel when you set out to document your investigation is your brain subconsciously recognizing its responsibly to get the facts right when there is nothing between you and the blank screen. This is a component, not an anomaly, of the investigative process, in which we collect information from disparate sources, write it down in all the ways prescribed by the Five Principles of Investigative Documents, and swear to its veracity during testimony.
With some degree of anguish, I swear to the veracity of this book. I present it for what I learned over two decades about best practices to document an investigation, for whatever purpose this information may serve. But even if this book was never published and nobody read it, I would have written it anyway, a memo to the file, a staring contest between me the abyss in which I questioned many of the things I thought I knew and emerged (I think) a more conscientious investigator because of it. I hope it makes you a better investigator, too.
Watch an interview with Hal Humphreys and Philip Becnel at our YouTube channel.
About the author(s):
A private detective since 1999, Philip Becnel heads Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group LLC, based in Washington, D.C. He also wrote Introduction to Conducting Private Investigations, which has sold more than 10,000 copies in the United States. He co-wrote Principles of Investigative Documentation with Scott Krischke, an assistant federal defender in St. Louis, and Alexandra Becnel, Philip’s life and business partner. Alexandra attends the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she is a business law fellow and former editor-in-chief of the University of Baltimore Law Review.