EXPOSED
The desk half of this job — public-records pulls, skip tracing, social media sweeps, credit and criminal database checks, and writing up the investigative report — is exactly what aggregation platforms and LLMs now do faster and cheaper, and that half has been shrinking for a decade. What survives is physical: sitting on a subject for six hours, following a vehicle through traffic, knocking on a neighbor's door, testifying about the chain of evidence. Most states license PIs and courts care who collected the evidence, which puts a real floor under the field-work tier even as the research tier commoditizes.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Half your billable hours — TLO and IRB searches, courthouse record pulls, asset and lien checks, drafting the surveillance summary — are now a subscription and a prompt away, while the other half (mobile surveillance in traffic, pretext canvassing at a door, catching the claimant lifting a cooler on video) can't be run remotely, which is why this lands at 10 and not 5 or 15.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. Insurance and infidelity work means hours in an unair-conditioned vehicle in a residential zone you don't control, moving on foot when the subject does, dealing with being made by a neighbor or a patrol car — uncontrolled and unpredictable, but you're not climbing towers or entering confined spaces, which is what separates 14 from 18.
Licensed human required and personally liable. Most states (CA BSIS, TX DPS, FL Chapter 493) require a licensed agency plus individual registration with hour requirements, and an unlicensed investigator's product gets excluded and can trigger criminal exposure — but the licence covers conduct and evidence handling, not a protected scope of practice a non-licensee is barred from performing, so it sits mid-band rather than at physician or PE level.
Some relationship component. Repeat business comes from a handful of defense firms, claims adjusters, and staff counsel who keep calling the investigator whose reports hold up in deposition, but the assigning adjuster rotates and much of the work is placed by panel or vendor network on price and turnaround, so the relationship is a real advantage and not the product itself.
Meaningful discretion. You decide in the moment whether to break off a follow, whether a pretext crosses into the state's prohibited conduct, what goes in the report and what stays out — and that call can taint a case or expose the client — but the assignment scope and legal boundaries are set by the retaining attorney, which caps this at 11.
Has AI actually changed your work?