TGO Investigations — What's New

Seven of them, on every investigation: surveillance, witness interview, scene investigation, mandatory notifications, process serving, drone operation and OSINT due diligence on a client.

The point of these is not remembering what to do, you already know. It is being able to show afterwards that it was done: that the vantage point was public, that the basis for identifying the subject was recorded, that three service attempts were made at genuinely different times, that the airspace was checked before the flight. That is what separates a file that survives cross-examination from one that does not, so the steps are written as things you can evidence rather than as reminders.

Tick steps as you go and add a note to any of them. Add steps the job throws up. Steps marked required have to be completed or explicitly marked not applicable before you can sign off, and marking something N/A is itself recorded. When you sign off, the whole thing is written into the case log with your notes, and it can no longer be deleted, because at that point it is part of the record.

These are drafted to common practice, not legal advice. Several of them, notifications, drone flight and recording consent in particular, turn on rules that vary by state and change. Read them against your own obligations. Al, tell me what is missing or wrong in any of them and I will change them.

The button on a case is now Letter Templates, and it covers three letters that had nothing to do with records requests:

• Evidence preservation letter, the one usually called a spoilage or spoliation letter. Puts a party on notice not to destroy, repair or overwrite anything relevant, and lists the things that actually get lost first: dashcam and CCTV footage, telematics and ELD data, maintenance and personnel records. It also asks them to suspend any automatic deletion schedule and confirm in writing.
• FOIA request letter for federal records. State public records acts do not reach federal agencies, so this runs under 5 U.S.C. 552 with the twenty business day clock and an optional fee waiver paragraph.
• Witness interview permission and scheduling letter, written so it works whether it goes to the witness or to the employer or counsel who controls access. It proposes times, states plainly that the interview is voluntary, and raises recording consent.

Public records requests are still suggested from what your case file actually supports, and are now listed underneath as a separate group.

These are drafts to a standard form, not legal advice. Anything shaded needs completing before it goes out, and the preservation letter asserts a legal duty, so have whoever is responsible for the matter read it first. Al, if you send me your spoilage letter I will match this one to yours.

One hourly rate for everything did not survive contact with real work. Settings now has a rate card: surveillance, OSINT and desk research, witness interviews, scene investigation, process serving, records retrieval, report preparation, court time, travel and mileage. Edit any of them, add your own, and set each one per hour, per mile, per day or as a flat fee.

When you add time you pick the service, and the matching rate applies to that line. So a single invoice can carry surveillance at one rate and desk research at another, and each line shows what it was charged at.

Changing a rate only affects work you record from then on. Anything already logged keeps the rate it was charged at, so putting your prices up never quietly re-prices a case you have already invoiced.

Washington taxes a service at the rate for the place it was delivered, so research done at your desk in one city and surveillance run in another are taxed differently on the same invoice. Add the places you work under Settings with a rate for each, and pick the location when you record time. The invoice then shows a separate tax line per location with the amount it was worked on, so a client can see exactly how the figure was reached.

You keep these rates yourself. They are not looked up from anywhere, which means nothing goes stale behind your back, but it also means checking them when your state publishes changes. As with your service rates, changing one only affects work recorded from then on.

If a charge has no location on it, no tax is applied to it and the billing screen says so, rather than quietly under-charging.

Set an amount off and a reason, both of which appear on the invoice. It is applied before tax and spread across the charges in proportion, so the tax due comes down with it and the split stays right when the work sits in more than one city.

A lead often does the billing for everyone. When you add a time entry you can now say which investigator did the work, rather than it always being recorded against whoever typed it in. It shows on the invoice under their name.

Choosing a file offered only photos and video, so there was no way to attach a PDF for scanning. Fixed everywhere you can attach something: the field app, the Documents tab, evidence on a case, and device check media. PDFs, scans, Word files, spreadsheets and text files all go into the vault now, and a PDF can be scanned the same way a photo can. The camera button is unchanged and still shoots a photo straight away.

Most documents you deal with, court orders, permits, insurer letters, are produced by a computer and already carry their text inside them. The system now takes that text directly. It is instant, it is exact to the character, and no scanning is involved, so a PDF becomes searchable and feeds Connect the Dots the moment you upload it.

Only a genuine scan or photograph, with no text inside it, needs reading by eye. Those are handled page by page as before. Either way the case file records which method was used, so it is on the record how the words got there.

There was no obvious place showing the time on a case. The billing panel only counted hours already pulled in for invoicing, which is usually less than what has been logged. The case file now shows Time logged next to the client and team: the total across every timed entry, how much of it has not reached billing yet, and a warning if you are over the budgeted hours.

Scanning reads pictures of pages, so it works on photos and PDFs but not on a Word or spreadsheet file. The button used to just disappear on those, which looked broken. It now explains itself and points you at Add text, which makes the contents searchable just as well.

There was no way to fix a mistake once an entry was saved. Every recent entry now has a Correct button. You type the corrected wording and a short reason, and the original is kept underneath with the entry marked as corrected. That is deliberate. An entry that could be quietly rewritten later is worth very little if the file is ever challenged, so nothing is overwritten and nothing is deleted. The button only appears on entries you are allowed to change.

Tapping "choose files" would only open the camera with no way to reach your photo library. Fixed. The picker now opens your library or your computer, and there is a separate Take a photo now button when you want the camera.

The old single box did not say whether it meant hours or minutes. There are now two fields, and entries read as "1h 35m" instead of "95m". The built in timer fills both automatically.

Investigators can only see investigations they are assigned to, and there was no way to assign anyone after the case was opened. Open the investigation and use the Team panel: pick the person, choose Lead or Support, press Add. They get access straight away. The ✕ removes someone, and anything they already logged stays on the case.

Notes only showed while editing a client. They now appear under the client name and in the case file.