Collect evidence for legal proceedings
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 10 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 10 occupations that perform it.
- Collect evidence to support contested claims in court.
- Collect, identify, evaluate, or preserve case evidence.
- Perform medicolegal examinations and autopsies, conducting preliminary examinations of the body to identify victims, locate signs of trauma, and identify factors that would indicate time of death.
- Prepare evidence for disciplinary hearings, including preparing witnesses to testify.
- Collect and analyze data to detect deficient controls, duplicated effort, extravagance, fraud, or non-compliance with laws, regulations, and management policies.
- Prepare briefs and assist in searching and seizing records to prepare charges and documentation for court cases.
- Prepare evidence for presentation in court.
- Measure and sketch crime scenes to document evidence.
- Summarize pertinent legal or insurance details, or sections of statutes or case law from reference books for use in examinations or as proofs or ready reference.
- Obtain summary of incident from officer in charge at crime scene, taking care to avoid disturbing evidence.
- Inquire into the cause, manner, and circumstances of human deaths and establish the identities of deceased persons.
- Conduct field surveillance to gather case-related information.
- Analyze data from computers or other digital media sources for evidence related to criminal activity.
- Observe and record the positions and conditions of bodies and related evidence.
- Collect and document any pertinent medical history information.
- Observe, record, and preserve any objects or personal property related to deaths, including objects such as medication containers and suicide notes.
- Collect wills, burial instructions, and other documentation needed for investigations and for handling of the remains.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Accountants and Auditors
- Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators
- Coroners
- Detectives and Criminal Investigators
- Forensic Science Technicians
- Fraud Examiners, Investigators and Analysts
- Government Property Inspectors and Investigators
- Labor Relations Specialists
- Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents
- Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Investigate criminal or legal matters”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.