Our Audits and Internal Investigations team partners with employers to mitigate legal risk, safeguard personnel, and ensure long-term operational integrity.
Whether responding to a critical whistleblower complaint or conducting a proactive audit to identify hidden vulnerabilities, we structure every engagement to protect sensitive findings while enabling meaningful corrective action. Our comprehensive services are designed to strengthen workplace culture and compliance.
- Conducting and directing privileged audits and investigations.
- Investigating workplace injuries, catastrophes, and near‑miss investigations.
- Managing whistleblower, discrimination, and retaliation claims.
- Preparing for and responding to OSHA and MSHA inspections.
- Developing privileged (and non-privileged) reports and strategic recommendations.
- Conducting witness interviews and high-stakes credibility assessments.
- Performing enforcement and litigation risk development.
- Creating governance programs and performing gap analysis.
We conduct impartial, defensible investigations into workplace incidents and allegations of misconduct, including:
- Accidents, injuries, fatalities, “near-miss” incidents.
- Complaints raised by third parties or government regulators.
- Allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
- Ethics hotline reports, theft, and misconduct.
- Theft, misconduct, and confidentiality breaches.
- Misappropriation of trade secrets and breaches of non-compete agreements.
- Strategic management of internal and external whistleblower reports.
- Unpaid overtime, minimum wage violations, off-the-clock work, and misclassification.
- Alleged failure to properly calculate bonuses, commissions, and incentive pay.
- FLSA and state wage and hour laws addressing claims such as misclassification, overtime, tip credit/tip pool/service charge, off-the-clock work, unpaid interns, and payment of bonuses and commissions.
- FMLA, military leave, and state parental leave laws.
- S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division investigations.
We partner with employers to conduct proactive reviews that strengthen operational performance and minimize regulatory risk, including:
- Evaluating exempt/non-exempt classifications, timekeeping practices, and payroll recordkeeping.
- Reviewing onboarding and offboarding procedures to safeguard company interests.
- Establishing identification, classification, and retention policies.
- Analyzing non-solicitation and non-disclosure agreements for enforceability.
- Formulating policies for digital monitoring and secure device recovery.
- Evaluating employee handbooks and internal reporting structures.
- Performing programmatic and facility-level OSHA and MSHA compliance reviews.
- Drafting protected audit reports and managing sensitive internal messaging.
- Developing defenses for MSHA’s unlimited enforcement lookback periods.
We design and deliver training tailored to your organization’s specific operational needs:
- Training on root-cause analysis and incident response.
- Building documentation discipline and effective interview questioning techniques.
- Educating in-house teams on legal privilege protections.
- Report-writing workshops.
- Implementing systems for tracking the progress of corrective actions.
- Specialized training for HR, management, and employees on safeguarding confidential information.
Representative Experience
- Advised a national employer by developing and implementing a comprehensive trade secret protection strategy, including confidentiality controls, employee training, digital activity monitoring, and structured exit protocols designed to prevent unauthorized disclosure or misuse of sensitive information.
- Counseled clients on best practices for aligning trade secret protection measures with evolving state and federal restrictions on restrictive covenants, including non-compete and non-solicitation agreements.
- Identified and corrected safety & health audit findings related to a subsequent OSHA inspection that resulted in no citations.
- Developed complex post-incident root cause analysis with third-party technical experts under privilege to allow facility to make appropriate repairs, while minimizing potential legal exposure.
- Enhanced the safety culture of the facility by implementing opportunities for improvement beyond baseline OSHA & MSHA compliance.
- Closed out numerous audits, thereby improving overall employee safety and health, as well as OSHA & MSHA compliance.
