Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

What do you do if you learn an important fact after you’ve already interviewed someone? This happens, it just does. I can foresee things like this better than I could when I first started as an investigator but it is inevitable that post-interview revelations happen. And it kind of depends

What do you do if your interviewee doesn’t understand what you’re asking because they lack capacity or because you expect that they lack capacity? It is very unlikely that you, as an investigator, can make a determination about someone’s capacity. There are certainly tests the layperson can utilize to determine

What do you do if your investigative plan isn’t working? Let’s say you interviewed your reporting party, came up with an investigative lineup, and, those people have no idea what you are asking about. Let’s say your plan is just not working. Assuming you’re billing your client by the hour,

What do you do with investigative facts? This concept is the foundation of your first step in an interview. You learn all the properties of a given fact and you do not just accept anything as fact before you know all of the “fact’s” properties. You ask all the ‘W’s

What do I do about the kinds of conclusions that I can make? First, investigators do not make legal conclusions. Judges make conclusions of law. Since we are not judges and we are not juries, we do not make conclusions of law. We can talk about what is ‘more likely

What do you do to create an investigative report template? I would start with the Association of Workplace Investigators report templates. You do have to be a member to get them, but AWI’s templates are exceptional.  At the end of the day, every report is somewhat unique, but very few

What do you do if your client hires you to investigate someone who tells you, “Oh, she’s just a feminist.”? From an investigative standpoint, I don’t know what that means. The academic concept of feminism is that everybody be treated equal regardless of your gender; however, people do not use

What do you do if you know someone is lying? I think that we owe the humans we come into contact with, particularly in investigations, the opportunity to respond to the knowledge that their veracity is being challenged. And so even if I know that someone is lying, I’m going

What do you do if you make an investigative exception? As investigators, the way that we can best avoid liability is by having consistent practices. And so, when we deviate from our consistent practice, we need to document why we did that. In all likelihood, any attention our deviation receives