Practice area 01
Surveillance & Cohabitation
Documented observation of what happens, when it happened and where — recorded so that it survives a courtroom.
Licensed Illinois private detective agency · Established 1991 · 35+ years
Surveillance is the core of this firm's work and the hardest thing in it to do well. It is not sitting outside a house hoping. It is deciding where a vantage point exists at all, how long a vehicle can hold it before it is noticed, what the subject's week looks like before you commit to a day, and when to stop because continuing would cost you the case.
Most of that work happens before an investigator leaves the office. By the time we are in position we already know the road layout, the parking restrictions, the sightlines, and which neighbours overlook which approach. A street of open, unscreened frontages is a different problem from a tower block with one entrance, and both are different again from a rural property with a half-mile drive.
In family matters this most often means establishing cohabitation — not a single photograph, but a pattern across days: who arrives, when, whether they leave, what they carry. A pattern is what persuades. One image rarely does.
What this covers
Included in an engagement.
- A written surveillance plan before any time is spent in the field
- Timestamped observation logs recording movement, times and locations
- Photography and video from lawful vantage points
- Vehicle and address verification where identity is in question
- A report structured so an attorney can put it in front of a judge
- The investigator who worked the case available to testify to it
Said plainly
What this service cannot do.
Worth reading before you instruct anybody in this profession, including us.
- We do not enter private property we have no right to be on, and we will not follow a subject onto it.
- We do not place tracking devices on a vehicle belonging to someone else.
- Surveillance records what happens while we are watching. It cannot prove what happened when nobody was.
Related
Often instructed alongside this.
Surveillance & Cohabitation
Tell us what has happened.
The first conversation costs nothing, goes no further, and you will get an honest view of whether this is something we can help with — including when the answer is that it is not.