Why you should hire a corporate investigations lawyer

The first step to conduct a corporate investigation is to assemble an investigation team or hire a corporate investigations lawyer. While this team can include some internal personnel, it’s a good idea for the team to be led by an outside attorney. Remember that to conduct an effective investigation that performs its purpose of protecting your business is to ensure the investigation is comprehensive and unbiased. 

If the investigation is not unbiased and comprehensive, then your company will make decisions that are based on wrong and incomplete information. Even worse, the lack of effectiveness in the investigation can later be exposed during the government enforcement actions or civil litigation. This is why corporate investigations must be done right. This page explains why you should hire a corporate investigations lawyer.  

Understanding the involvement of attorneys in corporate investigations 

It’s crucial for corporate investigations to be done right to avoid making costly mistakes, so you need to engage an experienced attorney. You see, there are some law firms that only handle corporate investigations. By working with such law firms, you can rest assured that the investigation will be professionally handled. 

Even better, having the right experts handle the investigation can give you the desired results. In most cases, the attorneys that oversee these investigations are experienced and know all the issues related to the specific investigation. Therefore, they can do proper investigation to help you make informed decisions on behalf of your company. 

Remember that the investigation team should also include the company’s staff. The best way is to involve executives, such as board members and corporate executives. You can also include an in-house attorney so that they can work together with the hired attorneys concerning issues related to the investigation. 

Also, you may consider including specific personnel in the investigation team, but this depends on the type of the investigation. For example, you can include IT staff in the investigation team if the investigation relates to breach of data management.

Aside from this, it’s worth noting that you need to have efficiency in the investigation. Therefore, having an in-house legal team can be a good idea, though you need to get experienced attorneys. If you don’t have experienced in-house lawyers, perhaps inexperienced ones can still contribute a lot to the investigation as they tend to do various significant tasks. They may also have knowledge of the operations of your company. 

This is important especially when it comes to the early stages of the investigation involving outside attorneys. But avoid including only in-house attorneys in the investigation because this can disturb their performance in the company. Well, the in-house attorneys still need to handle your company’s daily legal needs. 

The benefits of hiring attorneys in corporate investigations 

No doubt, you need to hire an attorney with the experience conducting corporate investigations. This can save you lots of money and time because you can get reliable results. Quite often, you need credible information from the investigation so that you can make the right decisions for the company. That said, here are some of the benefits of hiring an attorney to handle your investigation: 

The investigation team

A corporate investigation needs to have an investigation team that includes internal personnel. Therefore, an attorney can advise you on the right people to be included in this team. Ideally, any person who is under investigation needs not to be included in the investigation team to avoid compromising the investigation. 

Unfortunately, it can be quite hard to identify the people who qualify to be in the investigation team. This is the reason why you need an attorney to launch the investigation. In this way, you can avoid making some mistakes of having the potential wrongdoer to be part of the investigation team.

They can interview employees

In any corporate investigation, you can get information from various sources. And, one of the best sources is by interviewing employees of the company. But when you want to interview an employee regarding any alleged misconduct, it’s not a good idea to ask a coworker to do the interview. This can bring biases based on the relationship of the employees. Instead, it makes sense to hire an attorney to conduct the interview. 

In this way, you can avoid several issues related to employee relations and corporate culture. Best of all, you can make sure that the investigation is being handled by a capable and experienced attorney who understands the purpose and nature of the interview. 

Experience in corporate investigations

If you want to conduct a corporate investigation, there is no shortcut in handling its process.  Any mistakes can lead to the entire process being useless. Worse still, there are also some situations that can expose your company to liability issues. This is why experience matters when it comes to the investigation process. A lawyer who usually handles corporate investigations can take decisive action while keeping in mind the company’s short and long-term interests.

The independence of the investigation  

In many situations, it can also be hard to create an independent investigation that appears credible to all the stakeholders. The good thing is that an attorney is a suitable person who can handle a corporate investigation while ensuring that the investigation is independent. 

Any chances of biases arising may damage the credibility of the investigation. Hence, if the federal authorities or even the lawyer for the person being investigated start complaining about the legitimacy of the investigation, then the investigation can be questionable. 

To avoid these issues, you need to hire a corporate investigation firm that has experienced attorneys to handle the investigation on your behalf. This is important as it can show that your company desires to know the truth. You can also avoid some questions concerning the investigation, especially when experts from outside conduct it.    

Lastly, by hiring a corporate investigations firm, the stakeholders can rest assured that there was no self-interests in the investigation. A law firm handling an investigation can also help you to build a strong defense while they also handle the investigation. This can benefit your company because the investigators will be familiar with your company and its issues.