Professional Conduct and Investigative Practice
Domain 4: Professional Conduct and Investigative Practice
This domain tests how a licensed investigator works lawfully and ethically: client duties, confidentiality, surveillance limits, records, evidence, and testimony. Questions often turn on whether a technique is lawful, not merely effective.
Core conduct rules
- Keep client information confidential and use it only for the engagement. Avoid conflicts of interest and clarify the scope, fees, and deliverables in writing.
- Do not impersonate law enforcement, falsely claim legal authority, or encourage anyone to commit a crime.
- Surveillance from public places is generally permissible; trespass, peeping, stalking, and harassment are not. A person's privacy interest increases in homes, hotel rooms, restrooms, and other private spaces.
- Georgia is generally a one-party-consent recording state under O.C.G.A. § 16-11-66: a participant may record a conversation, but recording a conversation you are not part of, or planting a device in a private place, can be unlawful.
- Consumer reports implicate the Fair Credit Reporting Act; motor-vehicle records implicate the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. Permissible purpose matters.
- Preserve notes, photographs, timestamps, recordings, and chain-of-custody records. Testimony should separate observed facts from opinions and assumptions.
Worked example
A PI investigating a workers'-compensation claimant records a phone call in which the PI is a participant. That is generally permissible under Georgia's one-party-consent rule. The PI then leaves a recorder in the claimant's hotel room to capture conversations with others. That is different: the PI is not a party, and the room is a private place. The recording may violate law and will likely expose the licensee to Board discipline. The reasoning: the first recording has a consenting participant; the second does not and invades a private space.
Traps that cost marks
- Assuming a public-place surveillance rule authorizes trespass onto private property.
- Treating one-party consent as permission to record any conversation anywhere.
- Using pretexts that cross into impersonating police or unauthorized access to records.
- Mixing rumor or inference into a factual report.
- Failing to preserve original evidence or document chain of custody.