We have found that law or standards, within a discipline or profession, are indispensable for guiding investigations, and that where they do not exist or there is little consensus about them, investigations can be quite unstable. The example that comes to mind where the lack of real standards had a real effect was this class's investigation of the Cardozo Placement Office. There are no authoritative standards for assessing the quality of a law school placement offices. What standards exist are quite squishy and ill-defined. In this investigation, a tremendous amount of time was spent trying to define these standards, and when the dust settled it was unclear whether the facts which had been gathered meant much at all.
Investigations require the deployment of resources.
In a major wiretap investigation, both direct and indirect costs, can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. When Independent Counsel are appointed in Washington, even the most trivial investigations of official misconduct can run in the millions of dollars. We think that, on some level, something meaningful should be at stake in the in your investigations you do. One nice rule of thumb is that the investigation involve a potential victim. Unless you believe that the investigation is worth doing then there is a real risk that you will be less than engaged in the investigative enterprise, and learn little from it.