HIRING A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR: WHAT TO EXPECT

When hiring a private investigator, you should hire an expert that takes your case only if he/she believes that they can help you. The investigator should be clear about (a) What the exact investigative service and plan is, (b) how long it is going to take, and (c) how much it is going to cost. The costs should never exceed the agreed upon amount.

Thomas G. Martin is a professional private investigator and a former Federal agent. Martin only takes cases where he believes they can help the client. With murder cold cases for example, the agency only takes about 1 out of 10 cases because evidence is either unavailable or destroyed.

A transcript of the video follows:

In those cases where we believe we can help the client, we do 3 things for a client. We tell them exactly what the investigative plan is going to be, how long it’s going to take and what it’s going to cost. And that is pretty much down to the penny. So there’s no surprises with us. When we work, we work on a retainer basis, we tell the client we’re not going to exceed this amount, and we never exceed that amount, so there’s no surprises with us.

When I first started the business, we didn’t have any business. And therefore, we pretty much took any case that we could get – be it civil, criminal, domestic – any type of case that could generate some revenues and do some good for the client. This resulted in us becoming a full-service investigative agency.

Today, there are some cases I will not take. For example, I will not take a case involving anything to do with pedophiles. My personal belief is that pedophiles are people that cannot be rehabilitated, and I don’t want to use our good graces or our investigative skills to help them. Now, I know everybody deserves a defense, and I understand that. I would just like to give that opportunity for other private investigators to have the ability to work those cases.

As far as what type of cases that we do take, on some of our murder cases we actually take about 1 out of 10 that are proposed to us. The reason for that is, about 90% of them, I don’t think we can do the client any good. The case is too old, the evidence has been destroyed, and even with a world-class team of people that we have at our disposal, the bottom line is that we’re just not going to be able to help the client, so there’s no need to take the case.