What do you do if somebody calls you after their interview? If it’s the day or two after the interview and not a year later, I generally take those calls willingly. As investigators, most of the time, if we’ve done our jobs right, people don’t know that they are coming
What do you do to let your accused individual know that they are the accused in your investigation? I’ve talked about in other interviews, how I am very careful, never to bring other interviews into a current interview. And that includes the reporting party’s interview into the accused interview. And
What do I do to admonish an interviewee? My admonishments include introducing my law firm, introducing myself, introducing who I am, my role in this process. I generally will talk about the methods of investigation that are possible. I do that in part so that I can make the point
What do you do if someone makes additional allegations during one of your interviews? This can happen either when you are interviewing the reporting party or one of the other witnesses along the way. And it partially depends on the client, in part how well you know the client. For
What do you do if your interviewee does not participate in the investigation, or does not know what you are asking them? That’s kind of two different issues. So, if the person does not participate in the investigation, you need to, again, remind them that their employer expects them to
What do you do if an interviewee asks you about privilege for your investigation?A lot of investigations are done under privilege. I am not a litigator, I’m an investigator. So, I don’t pretend to be an expert in privilege and I know, across the country, perspectives on the way privilege
What do you do if intuition is the only reason you want to take some investigative steps? I think if you’re a young investigator, you need to check in with somebody else and check that intuition. This is because every move you make is expensive for your client. And so
What do you do if an interviewee is unresponsive, and I don’t mean like they’re no longer living, what if they won’t talk to you about setting up your interview, they’re ghosting you? Maybe you complete the interview with you and then they don’t follow up with the documents they
What do you do if you have an investigation about pronoun use? So I’m recording this in July of 2021 and I hope very much that this is the recording that becomes out of date the quickest. So, if you’re doing an investigation about pronouns, you should do some research
What do you do if someone is being abusive to you during an interview? This has come up with me on phone interviews and also in person interviews. At the end of the day, you are not being paid to be abused. That being said, the nature of workplace investigations
