Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

What do you do if somebody has company information related to your investigation on a personal device? We ask if we can have it! It can be a big issue because of ownership of intellectual property as a whole thing, but as a neutral, unbiased, third-party investigator, you should not

What do you do if the client asks you to stick around after the conclusion of your investigation to remedy the situation you investigated? You tread lightly because once you start reaping money from the situation you investigated, you start to whittle away at your own bias, right? So if

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 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 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