ABSTRACT
The ability to show initiative separates average, or even good, investigators from their more successful colleagues. Whether an investigator is in a detective squad, FBI office, prosecutor’s office, private investigative firm, or corporate setting, it is always easier for him or her to sit at a desk and wait for the phone to ring or for a supervisor to walk by with an assignment. Even when a case is already on the investigator’s plate, an investigation turns into nothing more than a “check-the-box” exercise, where the investigator simply goes from Point A to Point B by interviewing the expected witnesses and reviewing the expected documents. The result of such an investigation goes something like this: “Witness A said this, Witness B said that, the documents showed some things and not others, and we were able to draw some conclusions but not others due to insufficient evidence.”
