Do You Need a Law Firm, or Just an Independent Investigator?
When a serious complaint lands on your desk - bullying, harassment, misconduct - the instinct for a lot of business owners is to call a law firm and hand over the whole thing: the investigation, the advice, all of it.
That's one way to handle it. It's not the only way.
The investigation and the legal advice are two different jobs
An investigation is a fact-finding exercise. Someone independent interviews the people involved, reviews the evidence, and reaches a fair, defensible conclusion about what actually happened. Legal advice is what comes after - what those findings mean for your business, and what you do next.
A lot of law firms offer both under one engagement, and there's nothing wrong with that if it's what suits you. But it also means the investigation itself -usually the most time-consuming part of the process - gets billed at law firm rates. For a smaller business, that can make the whole thing feel out of reach, even when the complaint genuinely needs a proper, independent process.
Bringing in a specialist investigator directly is often more accessible
I focus on one thing: conducting workplace investigations. Thirty years in the New Zealand Police, twenty-one of them as a CIB Detective, is where the interviewing and fact-finding skills this work relies on come from. In 2019, I added to that with specific training through the Association of Workplace Investigators in Chicago, and I work as a licensed private investigator.
Because that's the whole focus of what I do, the investigation can be handled independently of a law firm's structure - which tends to make it significantly more financially accessible for small and medium businesses, without any drop in the standard of the process itself.
Your lawyer still has a role to play
This isn't about cutting lawyers out of the picture. Most of the businesses I work with come to me through a referral from their own lawyer, who keeps advising on the legal side while I handle the investigation. It works well as a partnership - a specialist doing the fact-finding, and your lawyer doing what they do best.
If you're weighing up your options
If you're facing a workplace complaint and wondering whether a proper investigation is within reach, it's worth asking: does this need to run through a law firm end-to-end, or can the investigation be handled independently, alongside whatever legal advice you're already getting?
If you'd like to talk through what that could look like for your situation, get in touch - there's no cost or obligation attached to that first conversation.
About the author
Steve Lockett runs Karapiti Workplace Investigations. He is a licensed private investigator with 30 years in NZ Police, 21 of them as a CIB Detective, and holds AWI-CH certification from the Association of Workplace Investigators. Read more about Steve.