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 I get a call and they say, “We want you to do an investigation. And depending how complicated it is, we might ask you to stick around and fix it.” Well, I now might have bias to indicate that the problem I’m investigating is super complicated so that I get to come back and do that remedy work. And that remedy work is important and identifying that remedy is super, super important. I talk in a lot of videos about root cause analysis and how valuable that is to the client and this is why.
The counter-argument to the bias though is that I didn’t know that I was going to be asked to do the remedy work until after I had made my conclusions. So how could I have been biased about the complicated nature or who the wrongdoer was if I didn’t know I’d have anything to do with remedying the situation until after I had announced my investigative findings? Now, obviously this does kind of put you on notice that they may ask the same thing next time they ask you to investigate. And so you’ve got to put up walls. And some people have an absolute rule that I either investigate or I remedy but never both. And that works for some people and some people it doesn’t. I think that is somewhat jurisdictional based on the volume of the work as well. If I could only do one or the other, perhaps I would. But anyway, those are the things you need to consider. It’s always the bias. It’s the bias that you might be challenged about when you get to be in defense of your investigation in a courtroom.
