Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

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 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

How do you use investigative counts to help with your investigation? Investigative counts are simply counts of opinions of people that you’ve interviewed. So, if the accusation is that Tom is mean to men, and I talked to 10 people, I’m going to ask all 10 people, including Tom, if

What do you do if your investigation is very delayed? You explain it. We always have a duty to create a prompt investigation. Here in Texas now, since 2021, we have a duty to do an “immediate” investigation. Point is, it should be done as soon as possible, but sometimes

What do you do if somebody reports to you that their evidence of discrimination is through a series of microaggressions? At the time of filming this, this most often comes up with folks that have less than ten years of experience in the workforce. Additionally, people who tend to work

What do you do if you don’t find out what happened to the people involved in an investigation when you’re done? Congratulations, you have now been initiated to one of the most frustrating parts of being a workplace investigator, especially as a third-party investigator. Even when I had repeat clients,

Sometimes people that I’m interviewing ask who is paying me. I guess that’s fair, they seem sometimes concerned that because the employer is paying me as an independent third-party investigator, that I am going to be biased in favor of the employer. And I suppose superficially, that makes sense, but

What do you do if you don’t know what to charge for an investigation? There’s a couple of issues here. First of all, the attorney code of ethics in your state will have something to say about what to charge, if you are not an expert in the thing that

It’s easy if someone doesn’t want to participate in an interview with you. You need to make sure that this is true, but generally it is. When someone doesn’t want to talk to me, doesn’t want to be interviewed, I just say, “Your employer expects you to participate and are

What do you do when someone tells you they will not disclose the name of their source? Generally, the first thing I say is, “Why don’t you want to disclose that information to me?” Sometimes the answer is because that person is afraid of retaliation for themselves or for that