For investigations -- pull hard drive to harvest image or do you sign in with local account?

I'm having a discussion about this right now with a colleague -- I work on forensic investigations for a school district. We have not had to go to trial for any of our investigations yet, but something that came up was the court approved/preferred method for image retrieval? We don't use remote retrieval -- the licensing for that is expensive. So in our case we can sign into the device, login with a local admin and then pull the image …

account computerforensics court drive forensic go to hard hard drive harvest image investigations local school school district sign trial work