- More harassment and discrimination complaints surfacing at American workplaces.
- A growing discomfort among employers to investigate their own people accused of misconduct.
- Corporate attorneys undertaking probes that would make them witnesses in cases they were supposed to defend.
Someone ought to create a business that does nothing but company investigations--once a complaint arises but before a lawsuit is filed--Maxwell and Scholick told themselves.
And then three high-court rulings came down last year that crystallized the direction of their own professional paths.
Maxwell and Scholick quit their prestigious litigator jobs at the nation's largest labor law firm--Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason--and quickly opened their two-person shop ... primarily focused on pre-litigation employment investigations.
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After years of practicing employment law, they knew first-hand that there was an overwhelming need for investigations to be conducted in a better, more fool-proof way.
Many people doing such pre-litigation probes--private investigators and employees in a firm's human resources department--have little or no legal experience. Consequently, Maxwell explained, they make mistakes and often write incomplete reports that won't withstand courtroom potshots.
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Whatever a company chooses to do with the worker, it can only hope to shield itself from further legal problems by showing it did a prejudice-free probe--a main theme in three high-court cases.
That neutrality, Maxwell and Scholick insist, is the hallmark of being successful in such sticky workplace situations--and the cornerstone of their service compared to a firm's full-time lawyer who works side-by-side with the employer on daily problems.
"Sometimes attorneys in that kind of close relationship will be afraid to say something that will anger the client," explained Maxwell. "But we're called in to address one particular incident so we think that gives us more impartiality and no fear of possibly telling the employer something it doesn't want to hear."