Organisations are increasingly outsourcing workplace investigations to external and impartial investigators to ensure workplace investigation processes are impartial and robust.
It is a trend that is only likely to continue. With increased rights for individuals, and increased obligations for employers, arising under the Employment Rights Act 2025, organisations will need to be more ready than ever to be able to demonstrate that concerns have been taken seriously and dealt with swiftly.
Our specialist team offers organisations the opportunity to use legal experts to undertake workplace investigations, enabling them to demonstrate impartiality at an early stage. Our clients value this service as they recognise that it is becoming increasingly challenging in some circumstances for organisations to carry out investigations themselves. This is a result of the:
- complexity of legal and factual issues involved – typically as a result of AI, we are seeing a real trend of employees raising a plethora of legal and factual issues which can prove difficult to ‘unpick’;
- greater awareness of and increased focus on discrimination issues;
- amount of skilled resource required to deliver the investigation efficiently; and
- increased risk of public and media scrutiny (“trial by social media”).
We have the legal knowledge, skills, and expertise to robustly investigate on an organisation’s behalf whilst still taking a flexible, collaborative, and practical approach. Importantly, we have a proven track record of acting as the investigator in complicated grievance and disciplinary matters – there is no risk of the process becoming too ‘legal’ and organisations outsourcing investigations benefit from essential resource not being over-stretched.
