The Courage to Investigate and Leave AI Behind
There was a letter awhile back in Barron’s that said, “Lawyers look backward to precedent. Innovators assiduously look forward and avoid precedent. The two mindsets are antithetical.”
The letter was about why lawyers at the SEC can’t keep up with the advanced math and technology that hatches new ways to beat out ordinary retail investors, as with high-frequency trading.
It got me thinking about the two mindsets people look for in an investigator. If precedent told us what we needed to know about what someone might do next, we could simply research the past and change the dates: he always settles four months after he files suit, he always parks his money in side companies named after the street he lives on, and so forth.
In fact, investigators have to look both backward and forward. Backward to find people with whom to discuss a subject’s past actions as well as mindset, and forward to try to imagine what a subject may be doing given past patterns and current facts. Some of those current facts are known, some need to be guessed at within constraints of limited time and budgets.
Artificial intelligence may be of little help. As I’ve written several times, if someone has never been written about, AI will have nothing to go on in figuring out what that person is like or what he may do next. If you ask ChapGPT about a specific but obscure person, it will tell you it can’t help because it doesn’t know about that person.
Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk elicit plenty of material and you don’t need me to find out a ton of information about them. But even a guy with $8 million in investments in convenience stores and car washes across the Carolinas will probably stump AI if he’s stayed out of the news.
It’s nearly ten years since the passing of my teacher and then colleague at Cardozo Law School, the evidence scholar Peter Tillers. He wrote extensively about the mindset of a fact investigator.
His view was that what contributes to making fact investigation especially daunting to some is justifiable fear of failure. That fear may be related to lack of innovation, he says.
“Explorers don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. It takes genuine courage to investigate,” wrote Tillers.
So when Google and AI will not give you the answer you want (or any answer at all), reach out to someone who, for a reasonable amount of money, will take the time to think differently about the job.
Someone who will look to history, to probability, and to information AI cannot reach — records not on line, and the information inside the heads of people you may need to have interviewed.
