Lawyers, Private Investigators, and Ethics

The body of literature (scholarly, practical, and popular) on private investigators (and their lawyer clients – or is it the other way around?) is a fairly large one, but it doesn’t hurt to add blog posts to that bibliography: From the always interesting PI Buzz’s Tamara Thompson comes this, “The Conversation Between Attorneys and Investigators.”

The Comment that begins thus, “[t]he point is that a PI should not rely on the attorney to set any objective ethical standards,” pretty much sums up a lot of what personal ethics decisions (and verdicts) are all about. “He made me do it” just doesn’t cut it for most of us. “I was following orders” is much more complicated, but then, so is life.

In my own Law Library, we have the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association (OCDLA) publication, The Investigator’s Manual, by David Audet and Wendy Kunkel.