So you have asked your questions and made your notes and looked at any relevant documents. You have formed the necessary views about what happened if that is the question or why it did if that is the issue instead. Now you just have to write it all down and a good job done, yes?
In our experience, internal investigators do reach most of the right conclusions for most of the right reasons but can tend to undo some of that work by the way they reduce them all to paper. As I may (certainly should) have said in an earlier post in this series, your investigation is only as good as the parties to it or the Employment Tribunal can be persuaded it is. For that you need supporting evidence in the form of a report which is detailed on the points it covers, comprehensive of all the points it ought to cover, and above all, reasoned.
It is not for an Employment Tribunal or an opposing lawyer to seek to unravel your investigation simply because they would have done it differently or asked some further questions or approached different witnesses or included something else in the report. The only burden on you is to act within that first of the two 3 Rs of a robust investigation, the Range of Reasonable Responses. If your investigation reports shows that you considered a point and rejected it for a half-way sustainable reason, neither the ET nor that lawyer will find it easy to argue your conclusion to be outside that range. However, if instead of a reasoned conclusion...
Delhi Police has rejected allegations that Congress leader Deepender Hooda or any other politician has been placed under house arrest, describing the reports as misleading and baseless. The police...