Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

What do you do if you get evidence that can be used in litigation? Basically, everything you’re doing could be used litigation. So, this certainly applies to everything. Your report, your interviews, your notes, your communications with your client. You need to assume everything can be used in litigation. But,

What do you do if someone will not tell you the name of a witness or the name of somebody else who’s experienced similar behavior? There is this idea, that I think starts for us at the playground, that we shouldn’t be a tattletale or we shouldn’t be a nark.

What do I do if I just cannot reach a conclusion as a result of an investigation? Maybe find a new career? It’s really not very good if you can’t do that in the vast majority of the issues and sub-issues. It’s incredibly unsatisfying to clients who are paying you

What do you do if you, as the interviewer or the investigator, are too embarrassed to talk about the topic to be investigated? You need to get off the investigation. There’s really no way around it, because if you can’t engage with the subject matter comfortably and robustly, you are

What do you do if something is wiped off a device? A lot of times employees,. will ctrl-alt-delete everything before they walk out of a workplace. Other times, they just wipe a personal device clean because they want to have closure regarding a former employer.  Most of the time and

What do you do if somebody ends an interview? If somebody walks out of an interview, as the investigator, it’s frustrating, but there’s very little you can control. Sometimes I cover this in my admonishments, but certainly when somebody says that they are done talking to me or just gets

What do you do if you don’t understand the industry you’re being asked to investigate? You are not usually being asked to learn about an industry, you’re typically being asked to learn about human behaviors. And obviously, the financial pressures and character types that are drawn to certain industries are

What do you do if you, as the interviewer or the investigator, are too embarrassed to talk about the topic to be investigated? Simply stated, you need to get off the investigation. There’s really no way around it because if you can’t engage with the subject matter comfortably and robustly,

What do you do if you don’t speak or understand the language of the interviewee? Again, it depends. One of the fundamentals of workplace investigations though, is that people be able to express their concerns and people, sometimes because of language skills, and sometimes because of anxiety, and sometimes because

What do you do when you don’t receive an admission? This is probably the much more likely outcome of an investigation around something like a Title VII or ADEA-type issue. People just don’t think that their own behavior ever rises to the level of being harassment, discrimination, or a hostile