Do I Need To Hire A Private Investigator For My Divorce Case?

Note: Our Podcast, “Do I need to hire a private investigator for my divorce case?”, was created to be heard, but we provide text transcripts to make this information accessible to everyone. All transcripts on our website are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and could contain errors.

00:00:05 – Jaime Davis
Welcome to a year and a day. I’m Jaime Davis, board certified family law attorney at Galer Hunt. On this show, I talk with lawyers, psychologists, and other experts with the goal of helping you navigate divorce without destruction. In this episode, I’m talking with Cat Flowers, CEO and private investigator of Cat’s eye private investigations. Cat founded Cat’s Eye Private Investigations in 1997 after a career ending injury forced her to retire from law enforcement. With over 30 years of industry experience, Cat has a wide range of skills and knowledge to handle various types of cases, from workers compensation and domestic surveillance to criminal investigations and computer forensics. Cat is also the lead instructor at PI Leadership Academy, where she develops and implements the curriculum for training programs for private investigators and law enforcement personnel. Thanks for joining me, Cat.

00:01:03 – Cat Flowers
Oh, thank you for having me.

00:01:04 – Jaime Davis
So, tell us a little bit about your background and what made you want to become a private investigator.

00:01:09 – Cat Flowers
Okay. Well, that’s easy. I’ve always been nosy. That’s really the easy way to put it. I’ve always wondered what happens behind the yellow tape. I’ve always, always been curious and inquisitive and always wanted to solve a problem or puzzle. Somebody told me a long time ago when I was about 17 years old, if you find out what it is, that makes you dig in that direction. So since I was about 18 years old, I’ve kind of been working the trajectory of law enforcement and then private investigations, and here I am today. So I am originally from New York. I came down to North Carolina for college. I joined the Raleigh police department. I’m a commissioned officer in the military police corps. As you mentioned, my injury ended my career, and then I became a private investigator, and I’ve been doing that for the last 27 years.

00:01:56 – Jaime Davis
That’s great. I think private investigations is so interesting, and actually, they joke at the office that they think I may have missed my calling because I get so into it.

00:02:04 – Cat Flowers
It’s deep. It’s deep. It’s a lot.

00:02:07 – Jaime Davis
So how does a private investigator assist in a divorce case?

00:02:11 – Cat Flowers
You know, there are so many ways, the point I want to convey is that a private investigator’s job is to do no harm. Their job is to enhance and to support the lawyer’s case and to bring facts and circumstances that may not ever come to light had the lawyer not hired a private investigator, but if you hire the wrong private investigator, then you really put yourself in a position where you can do harm to a case and potentially compromise a case. And it’s very delicate when you’re dealing with family law. Cause you’re dealing with families and children.

00:02:45 – Jaime Davis
Well, so what do you mean by that? Like, how could a PI potentially compromise a family law case?

00:02:50 – Cat Flowers
Really good. Really good question. One of the ways is, just by being overly aggressive, I try to train PIs to realize, we’ll live for another day. Sometimes you can go and there’s a couple inside a bar, and they’re making out, and it’s an infidelity case. And then a PI just goes and puts a camera right in their face, and then they just realize, you know, hey, why is this person sitting right up underneath me? You know? And the PI uses the same car every single day, same tactics. Or they bust red lights to make sure that they don’t lose a person. Or worse yet, they get caught putting a tracking device underneath the car. So there are a lot of bad things that PI can do to ruin a case. And I try to coach my clients and let them know that, just be patient with me. I’ve got experience to do this, and if you trust me, then I’ll make sure that we come out okay.

00:03:37 – Jaime Davis
Right. You want it done right, not quick. Right.

00:03:39 – Cat Flowers
There you go.

00:03:42 – Jaime Davis
So what are the common types of issues you handle in connection with family law cases?

00:03:47 – Cat Flowers
Sure. So we do a lot of. Everybody loves their children, right? So we always deal with a child custody matter. We clarify. Let’s just say, for example, we have a parent who takes a child to the clubhouse when it’s there, or child custody schedule, and then they consume a lot of alcohol, and then they have to drive either back to the house or drive to another location with the children in the car. That’s an issue. One parent may be mentally ill, and they may do some things that are completely inappropriate with the child. For example, I just recently had a case where a gentleman said he could not wear clothing in the home, and he had a daughter, he was coming out of the house hardly dressed at all, and then he was embracing his daughter inside the house with no clothes. But we had to provide some supporting proof that this was his habits, his behavior. That’s troubling.

00:04:41 – Jaime Davis
Sure. Absolutely. What other issues do you all deal with besides custody cases?

00:04:46 – Cat Flowers
So we deal with custody. We deal with, of course, cheating husband, cheating wife. And I say that, respectively to both parties. Cause each side does their own thing. So we deal with cheating husband, cheating wife, child custody. You know, I was listening to one of your episodes where you talked about parent coordinators, where a parent coordinator might give a family member a specific instruction, you are not to do this or you are to do this. And then oftentimes, we will have a parent that will try to skirt with the family coordinators or advise them not to do or to do, for example, provide stable housing. One parent may take their child to a hotel because they got evicted, and they don’t want the other opposing party to know. So that is contradictory to what the. The advisor said. So that’s what we do. We clarify terms.

00:05:37 – Jaime Davis
Can you walk us through the typical process you follow when you’re investigating a family law case?

00:05:42 – Cat Flowers
Sure. Sure. It’s my pleasure. You know, it’s the old adage, garbage in, garbage out. You want to make sure that you get really good intake information from your client, aside from the emotional aspect of the information, because a lot of times when we deal with a family law case, our clients are emotional, and they want to tell us all the things that have to do with their relationship but are not necessarily factual as it relates to the case. So what I do is I just kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, and I just say, okay, here are the facts. And then I approach every case with a very objective mind, in spite of what the client may want me to believe, unless they have proof to convince me in a very clear way that this is, in fact, what’s happening, I don’t assume anything. I like it. The process to building a house. At first, you want to start out with a solid foundation, and then you want to have your walls go up, and then you get your roof, and then finally, you do your finishing touches with your sheetrock and everything on the inside, but you have to go through the steps. And a lot of times when we meet clients, they’re very anxious, and they want to get to the end point, and they want to start hanging shingles on the first day. You can’t do that. You have to follow the steps and satisfy the elements of what with what it is you’re trying to prove.

00:06:56 – Jaime Davis
So, typically in these cases that you handle, how involved is the attorney in the intake process, or do you mainly deal directly with the client?

00:07:04 – Cat Flowers
Really good question. You know, some clients. I’m just gonna use the word, are anxious.

00:07:11 – Jaime Davis
Sure.

00:07:11 – Cat Flowers
Some clients don’t really want to know the truth. And for the sake of them, when I say the truth, what the case may unveil. Right. And so, for the sake of their mental health, I might work more closely with an attorney, which is gonna cost them more, of course. Cause you gotta pay the TPI and you have to pay the investigator. But for the sake of their mental health, we will spare them the outcome and then get the proof that they need, if that’s the route that they wanna go. And then some people wanna work directly with the PI themselves. It really depends. I like to have contact information for both people so that if I need to reach out, I can.

00:07:49 – Jaime Davis
So let’s say that you’re working on a potential cheating case and you’ve gotten the intake from your client. Have a good understanding of the facts. What is the next step? Usually in the process, the next step.

00:08:02 – Cat Flowers
Is to outline objectives, key objectives, and then I prioritize those objectives in order of importance, because I always want to be efficient and effective, right. I always want to be able to tick off the boxes that are most important to the case in a sequential order as it relates to what’s important to not based upon emotion, right. So if it is just proving adultery, do I have time, place, opportunity? And then if you want me to get something else, I can work on other aspects. If he’s drinking too much before he picks up the kids, I can work on that, but let’s satisfy those priorities. So the next thing is objectives, and let’s tick them off in sequential order.

00:08:43 – Jaime Davis
So with your cases now, how much would you say is like actual boots on the ground surveillance versus, let’s say, gps tracking or something like that?

00:08:53 – Cat Flowers
Really good. Really good question. To be honest with you, I don’t do gps tracking unless it is in conjunction with surveillance. And the answer there is really quite clear, because a gps tracking device, all it does is it gives us data, which is awesome. It never goes to sleep, which is awesome, and we don’t lose a person in traffic. All those things are great, but they don’t have eyes and they can’t report facts. And there are technological devices which are subject to fail. And sometimes if I just give a client data, there will be 20 more questions that I can’t answer because the information is not real time. So in order to satisfy the client wholly, I only use GPS tracking devices in conjunction with surveillance.

00:09:41 – Jaime Davis
So we just talked a little bit about GPS tracking devices. What other tools and technologies do you use in your investigations?

00:09:49 – Cat Flowers
Oh, boy. They call me the gadget lady. They call me the gadget lady. So one of these things I’ve just gotten hooked on is these. There’s actually version one and version two. It’s the Ray ban story glasses. Are you familiar with them?

00:10:02 – Jaime Davis
I’m not, but I’d love to learn more.

00:10:03 – Cat Flowers
Right. So Ray ban collaborated with Facebook, aka Meta, and they came out with these glasses so that you can wear them and they look like typical ray bans. Okay, so there’s version one and version two. If you’re a PI out there, get version one because version two has a couple of lights that flash and let people know you’re recording. But what they do, essentially, is they allow us to just touch the arm of the glasses and we can start recording and get really close to people, and they don’t realize that they’re being recorded at. We can actually capture still images and get right up on a person and get really good footage indoors. So that’s my new gadget.

00:10:44 – Jaime Davis
That sounds like a fun one.

00:10:45 – Cat Flowers
Yeah, yeah. And the version two is really great, too, because both of the devices. But the quality even gets even better when you get version two. It does let a light on. There are a couple tricks on how to bypass that. So that’s one of our gadgets we use. And then we also use a really interesting. It looks like a Starbucks coffee cup. And, you know, the foam coffee cups you have with a plastic lid on top, and then that has a port on it where we can put a micro SD card in it. And if we’re in a restaurant or something like that, we can literally put the cup on the table if it’s a morning event or something like that, out in public and person’s being recorded and they don’t realize it. So that’s two things. And of course, gps tracking devices, right?

00:11:27 – Jaime Davis
Of course. So is there any new technology with these gps tracking devices? Like, where do they go on the vehicle? That sort of thing?

00:11:36 – Cat Flowers
We put them in some interesting places. I don’t want to get anybody out there paranoid, because I don’t want to give up all the secrets. But recently, I’ll just tell you an example. We just had a person that drives a Tesla, right? So if you have a Tesla, you realize that they’re really low to the ground, a lot of them. Cause they’re really sexy cars. And then they don’t have compartments because they’re so soundproof. Elon made it so that they’re pretty much sealed underneath. So leave it to me. What I did was I took the kit that you have where you recharge a Tesla, and I cut it open with a razor blade, and then I put a tracking device back in it, and then I sewed it back into the kit. So the driver was literally, literally made sure that they had it with them every day. Cause they wanna recharge their car on the go, and they were actually hauling around my tracking device with them almost everywhere. A Tesla is really interesting, and a lot of PIs don’t know where to put a tracking device on a Tesla. And then you have other vehicles. We have one now that goes in a fuse box.

00:12:37 – Jaime Davis
Okay.

00:12:38 – Cat Flowers
So, you know, you get in a car and it doesn’t run out of power because it’s being powered by the fuse box, and it looks like a regular fuse. So not to give away all the secrets, but if somebody wants to follow you, just trust and believe that there’s a way to get you. And they can hide a tracking device on your car.

00:12:56 – Jaime Davis
So can anybody put a tracking device on anybody else’s vehicle?

00:13:00 – Cat Flowers
Is that legal here in the state of North Carolina? That’s absolutely not legal. So we are governed by 74 c, which is a statute for private investigators. But there is a subsection, subsection number eight, which private investigators lobbied really hard for, which gives us an exemption. We are exempt from the rules of everybody else, which is cyber stalking. Stalking. So you can’t. A civilian cannot just go put a tracking device on somebody’s car because that is stalking, and they can go to jail for that. And we’ve had cases, even with air attacks, where people put devices on another person’s vehicle and they shouldn’t be doing that. Cause they’re not. They don’t have that exemption. But we do have that exemption. We can use them in every case with the exception of a case where there’s domestic violence in question.

00:13:48 – Jaime Davis
So how do you ensure that your methods are both effective and legally compliant?

00:13:54 – Cat Flowers
Well, I’m so passionate about the industry that I actually read books about ethics and private investigations where most people would probably get bored. But I think that we all, within us have a moral compass, right? And so we have to say to ourselves, what feels good and what feels icky. So if you have a workers compensation case and you’re doing surveillance on somebody, you don’t go put a tire in their front yard. Right. And sometimes domestic cases, you have a client, and they’re anxious. They want it to be over, and they’ll say, hey, can you climb in the backyard, look through the window? I just don’t do things like that. Right back to what I said at the beginning. I take what the case gives. If the client has the resources for us to work the case effectively and efficiently, we will get what they need. But I don’t think that you should force anything to the point where. To the point where the investigator looks unethical when they have to go to court to support the case. I don’t think you should do that.

00:14:49 – Jaime Davis
Can you share an example of a case where your investigation made a significant impact on the outcome of a case?

00:14:56 – Cat Flowers
Sure. I recently had a case, probably within the last year. My client was a woman, a lovely woman, and she was a retired librarian, and she was married to a physician, and he was a psychiatrist, as a matter of fact, and he was a supervisor, many other psychiatrists. And to make a long story short, she actually suspected that he might be having an extramatal relationship. But they had been together for 30 years, and everything was in his name, and she felt really very hopeless. But she trusted us to bring our case to conclusion, and we found out way more than he was doing some horrible things. Some things in terms of abusing some drugs, in terms of seeing people off of websites, he was doing some things that were just really not professional, even engaging in relationships with coworkers. So that’s bad. And eventually, this person lost their license because they had a relationship with the patient. As a result of all of the information that we were able to obtain, my client got everything she wanted for fear that this information would be released to the medical board.

00:16:07 – Jaime Davis
That’s great.

00:16:08 – Cat Flowers
Yeah, she’s happy. She’s very happy. She’s very happy.

00:16:12 – Jaime Davis
So I’m sure you have lots and lots of stories from your years of doing this type of work.

00:16:17 – Cat Flowers
I do.

00:16:18 – Jaime Davis
What is the craziest thing that you’ve seen in your investigations?

00:16:21 – Cat Flowers
You know, after a while, you kind of get numb to the crazy. So since this is a PG show, I’m not gonna get into. I’m not gonna get into everything that we see, because most of the things that we see that are really crazy have to do with the risk that people will take in public. Most recently, we had a nurse who was cheating with one of my clients husbands, and they had lunch at a restaurant, and then they went to the parking lot, and they did part two, you know, so people, upstanding people, professional people, will do the craziest things in public places to be compromised, and it’s just really embarrassing.

00:17:02 – Jaime Davis
Yeah, we see that a lot. It’s like they think they’re just never gonna be caught, and they’re very brazen in their actions.

00:17:07 – Cat Flowers
Yeah, exactly. And I think some of that has to do with the thrill of it all. The thrill of it all. And so we see a lot of that where people just take risks that aren’t really necessary. And then sometimes we had a case not long ago where it was a female, actually. And our husband was going to work every day, and she was bringing men into the home. She was bringing men into the home. And then my client came home one day, and he opened up the door, and you just see a man ran out with no clothes on. I’ve seen that happen before where a spouse comes home and I try to hold her back. I try not to give people real time information, but next thing you know, you see somebody flying out the door, you know, with no clothes on, and there’s nowhere to go, and then they’re out in the woods for 1015 minutes, you know, with no clothes on. So it’s just horrible. So peachy show. So I’m gonna keep it there. I’m gonna leave it there.

00:17:59 – Jaime Davis
Right. So how do your findings typically influence court decisions in family law cases, if, you know?

00:18:06 – Cat Flowers
I do know. I do know. And our findings help tremendously because, you know, most people think private investigator, you go to court all the time. We probably only go to court three times. And if anybody’s familiar with the movie the Godfather, where you just kind of sit in the gallery and then they see you there, and then everything just dims. Everybody just wants to kind of wrap up. So I know for sure that although people have to pay the expense of hiring a private investigator, the private investigator themselves, if they do a good job and if the outcome is positive, will pay for themselves ten times over, because the proof is there and it could be substantiated and validated. And, of course, we’re professional and we’re prepared to come to court, testify to.

00:18:48 – Jaime Davis
It, I was gonna say. So as a lawyer, we find your reports to be particularly helpful because they help us get cases settled.

00:18:56 – Cat Flowers
Exactly.

00:18:57 – Jaime Davis
You know, once the other side knows that, you know, and, you know, the information is gonna be out there, do they wanna keep that private? Do they wanna make it public? And a lot of times it can help us reach a settlement in cases.

00:19:08 – Cat Flowers
Oh, for sure. I mean, whenever my clients have a mediation or whatever, we make sure that they. I’m always proud of the work that we do, and I’m always proud of our investigative reports, and I always wanna make sure that they’re very comprehensive, and I wanna make sure that we’re giving the attorney the information that they need so that they can ask the most damning questions and have the opposing party realize, you know, hey, this gig is up. I need to go ahead and make this go away. Just going back really quickly to the case that I just told you about, where the lady was professional, and then they did a sex act in their car. Both of those people are professionals. Do you really want that coming out with your coworkers? Let’s just go ahead and resolve that. And so I think that that one instance, or in that case, several instances, just puts it over the top where it will never see the light of day in a courthouse.

00:19:58 – Jaime Davis
How has the role of private investigators in family law cases changed over the years?

00:20:04 – Cat Flowers
The role’s changed, in my opinion, dramatically. When I started in 97 98, there wasn’t another african american female in the triangle doing private investigations. In fact, it wasn’t until five years later that there was another female that I even met doing that. Yeah, the role has changed tremendously because I think when I first started, everybody imagined it would be an older white male with a cop, you know, pipe and glasses and khakis and a golf shirt. But now it’s just changed tremendously. Now you have women doing it, you have younger women doing it. You have hispanic women doing it. So I think that for the person that’s out there being cheating or being dirty, they’re all, none of them pay attention to us.

00:20:50 – Jaime Davis
Right.

00:20:51 – Cat Flowers
You know, they’re like, oh, it couldn’t possibly be them. And then it’s us, and then they’re like, gosh, but, yeah, but it’s changed. A lot of women are coming into the industry.

00:21:00 – Jaime Davis
That’s great. So a situation I see a lot. I’ll have a client come in and he or she will say, I think I have a tracking device on my vehicle. What do I do?

00:21:11 – Cat Flowers
Sure. The first thing I say is, stop what you’re doing if you’re cheating. Sometimes they have a dragon device on their car because they are cheating. So the first thing I say is, stop what you’re doing. The second thing I would say would be to hire a private investigator to come out and to look for that vehicle and to make sure, because the average person has no idea where that tracking device may be hidden at. And then also to understand that if you do find it and you take it straight to your lawyer’s office, then you just send a signal to the opposing party. Right. That we have it. There is a very careful way of opening up a tracking device and making sure that when you, if you unplug certain components of it, that it’s going to send signals to the opposing party. So I tell it what we do, and I’ll share this with you. If we’re going to go look for a person’s, a tracking device, if they suspect the tracking device is on a vehicle. We’re gonna go to a place where they would normally be, food line their job, and we’re gonna look for it there. Don’t come to my office. That’s not gonna help. Right. And then we’re gonna see if we can find it. And then once we find it, then we make an assessment about what to do next. What signals do we wanna send to the opposing party?

00:22:30 – Jaime Davis
And then I guess the client has more of a say in what’s gonna happen, I guess, next in their case.

00:22:34 – Cat Flowers
Oh, for sure. You know, sometimes. Sometimes we just close the device up and put it right back, now we know. Right. And the most recent incident we had, we were able to take out the tracking device. Let me, for those that don’t know, a tracking device is nothing but a cell phone that doesn’t ring. Right, essentially. I mean, it has other parts to it, but it has a SD card in. It’s just like a cell phone with a. We took it out, and we were able to discover the IME number, and then we were able to trace that IME number to a carrier, and they were able to issue a subpoena to the carrier so that we can find out exactly who that, quote, unquote, cell phone number was issued to so that we can subpoena all of the records that the PI may have had.

00:23:22 – Jaime Davis
Yeah, that’s super interesting. And I guess there’s some implications there too, right? Like if it belongs to an individual versus another private investigator.

00:23:30 – Cat Flowers
It is. It’s really interesting. You know, a lot of times, in the interest of saving money, the client will say, well, the tracking device showed my wife at Johnny’s house five times. I need you to put that in your report. But I don’t do that because for the sake of argument, that tracking device could have been taken off of another vehicle, put onto that vehicle, and then that vehicle drives there. And I can’t go to court and testify to what it is that I’ve not seen. So that’s why we use them in conjunction with one another. Because I just had a tracking device found, and my client put it on the back of an 18 wheeler and it just went straight on down. It went right on down the road. So you can’t really testify to what it is you haven’t seen.

00:24:12 – Jaime Davis
What trends or changes do you foresee in the future of private investigations within family law?

00:24:19 – Cat Flowers
You know, one of the trends that I would have said was gonna happen, but it, the law exchange and that nip dead in the bud was drone technology. I am an FAA certified drone pilot, and you need a commercial license to fly a drone for business, and I have that qualification. And I have flown my drone for business before, but not related to family law. But I think that if the laws were to change, PIs would be over a person’s house, you know, and then you have this unreasonable search and seizure on an individual where it comes to the point where it’s stalking. But I think fortunately, and unfortunately, laws have come into place that have stopped us from using drones. I think that the novice would try to use an airtag, which is not good. We’ve seen people charged with crimes as a result of cyber stalking. I had a client not long ago use some kind of, like, superglue and decide they were going to put an airtag on their spouse. Sure enough, they come around with the iPhone. It says, hey, you’re being tracked. Cyber stalking, law violation. One other thing that I think that as it relates to gps tracking, you know, we are able to put a tracking device on a car and set up a geofence, which is if a car goes to that area, let me know, and then we can tell how long a car has been there and develop patterns on a person. And so we get text messages. The car is in this zone, the car is out of this zone. So it helps us to further formulate reports so we can determine a person’s pattern of life, if that makes sense.

00:26:00 – Jaime Davis
Yeah, that seems like it’d be super helpful, too. I mean, from a cost standpoint, right?

00:26:03 – Cat Flowers
It is helpful. It is helpful. You know, we happen to be delving right now really deep into GPS drone technology, and without being overly complicated, there’s a lot of factors that happen. But if a PI has a tracking device that they can use easily, you know, sometimes, in all honesty, we’ll put two or three tracking devices on a car. And if you find one, we have another one up there. Another one up there. So, I mean, everything’s so fluid. We are always challenging ourselves, always trying to grow, trying to figure out what it is that we can do to be more efficient and more effective. Sometimes people think a tracking device might be on my car, it might not be on my teenager’s car, but we have one on every car in the family because people change cars, right? So that’s what we do.

00:26:52 – Jaime Davis
Just seems like you guys have to keep evolving with the technology as it evolves.

00:26:56 – Cat Flowers
Oh, we do. We do. And the thing, you know, I’m proud to be in a position where I can share with other investigators, you know, the things that they need to do in order to get up to snuff, because a lot of people make a lateral transfer into the business, and they really don’t understand everything that it takes to understand all the components to paint a very clear picture of what happens on a case. But it’s. You have to have a good video camera. You have to have a. A stealth camera. You have to have a gps tracking device. You have to have solid reports. There’s so much that goes into being able to paint a very clear picture for your client.

00:27:35 – Jaime Davis
If you could give only one piece of advice to someone going through a divorce, what would it be?

00:27:42 – Cat Flowers
Be patient. It’s gonna take time. I’ve seen the best cases ruined by a person forcing something to happen prematurely. And when that happens, the private investigator. We just had a case recently where we had awesome, awesome information. What we needed to satisfy one or two more elements, and our client just was not going to have it. And as a result, we moved forward, and the judge was in our favor, but the client was just irritable and not the best witness for themselves, and it fell apart. And we got some information on that particular case, some stuff that I’d never seen in 27 years. And we went to court confident, but the client wanted to force their way through. So be patient. If you’re hiring a private investigator, even though you’ve been suffering and going through your situation for a long time, understand that the private investigator for them is day one, the day that you hire them.

00:28:45 – Jaime Davis
Yeah, I think that is wonderful advice and something that I say to my clients as well. I mean, I said it earlier in the episode, you want it done right, not quick. And, you know, sometimes, especially when you’re in that investigative stage, right. You really just need to put on the act of your life and continue to be the good and dutiful spouse and let your investigator do their thing and get the information that you need for your case.

00:29:07 – Cat Flowers
Most recently, I had a case that was the attorney told the client, hire a private investigator, and then for four months, the client did not hire a private investigator for four months. The client knew that their spouse was having an affair. On month five, they hired me after they obtained some information illegally, which is not admissible. And they’re like, chop chop, get it done. And I’m like, today is my day one, right? And the client did not take the foot off the gas, even though I was involved, and I asked them to, and they ended up compromising their investigation themselves. Because sometimes when you’re stressed out, sometimes when you’re anxious, the client will be in communication with me, and they will send a text message to their spouse which says, you got em now. You know, keep up the hard work. You know, keep up the hard work. You got em now. We got em where we want em, you know? And they text the wrong person this message because they were trying to do too much. Slow down, be patient. Take a deep breath. And I know nobody wants to hire private investigators like bringing a plumber to your house. I don’t wanna see you, but I need you, so let me do my job.

00:30:31 – Jaime Davis
I feel the same way. Nobody wants to hire a divorce lawyer either.

00:30:33 – Cat Flowers
Exactly right. But we have a job to do, and we want to do it right. And nine times out of ten, our clients, even though they’re dealing with a very difficult situation, they’re very thankful. At the end of the day, you know, they’re very thankful. I just not long ago, had a case where I had a gentleman who was potentially violent. He had two children. Both children were autistic, and he liked one, but the other one not so much. And we did surveillance, and we were able to document that he was literally abusive to the second child. The second child was more on the spectrum, and we were able to show the child walking into traffic and him seeming like he didn’t care, him yanking the child, him pushing the child, and being kind to the other child. And he was also taking the children to places that he wasn’t supposed to take them. And as a result of that, we were able to get an attorney on board. And this person lost full custody. Well, not full custody. Lost joint custody of the children completely, like never to be seen again. And the mom and the dad, the new dad, stepdad, they literally sold their house, changed schools, and moved to a different city. And the father, by your father had 50 50 custody.

00:31:55 – Jaime Davis
Wow.

00:31:56 – Cat Flowers
And he lost it as a result of our work and just documenting his abuse to the children.

00:32:03 – Jaime Davis
Well, Cat, you did such wonderful, wonderful, helpful work for people. Thank you so much for joining us today.

00:32:09 – Cat Flowers
Thank you for having me.

00:32:15 – Jaime Davis
Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcast so you don’t miss the next one. While the information presented is intended to provide you with general information to navigate divorce without destruction, this podcast is not legal advice. This information is specific to the law in North Carolina. If you have any questions before taking action, consult an attorney who is licensed in your state. If you are in need of assistance in North Carolina. You can contact us Gaylor Hunt by visiting divorce istough.com dot I’m Jaime Davis and I’ll talk with you next time on a year and a day.