When a workplace harassment complaint is serious enough, or conflicted enough, or simply beyond internal bandwidth, organisations turn to outside help. (See: Who Should Investigate – And When HR Shouldn’t)
That decision is usually the right one. The harder question – and the one most organisations spend too little time on – is who that outside party should be.
Most organisations default to the law firm that already advises the company. It is the familiar escalation path, and there is a certain comfort in following it. But for most workplace harassment investigations, a law firm may not be the best party for the job. Understanding why requires starting with what an investigation actually is.
What an investigation is - and isn’t What an investigation is - and isn’t
A workplace investigation is a fact-finding process. Its purpose is to establish, as clearly as possible, what happened – who did what, when, in what context, and with what effect.
Because it is fact-finding, the conditions for a good investigation are easy to state and hard to achieve: witnesses must feel safe enough to speak honestly, the process must be seen as fair and independent, and no one in the room – complainant, respondent, or witness – should feel that the investigation is serving the interests of any particular party, including the company. When those conditions are met, people talk. When they are not, the investigation produces a partial picture at best.
This is why the choice of investigator deserves more thought than it usually gets.
When organisations call in external legal counsel to investigate, they typically call the firm that already advises them on employment matters – potentially the same firm that would defend the company if the matter proceeded to litigation. That firm has an ongoing commercial relationship with the company: past instructions, future ones, a fee relationship to maintain. And its professional duties of loyalty and confidentiality run to the company, its client, not to the witnesses being interviewed, who have no lawyer-client relationship with the investigator and no protection from them at all.
Employees know this, or sense it, even when it is not stated explicitly. The lawyer sitting across from them is not a neutral party. They work for the company and the company is who they answer to. That perception, whether or not it reflects the investigator’s actual conduct, changes what people are willing to say. It is a real or perceived conflict of interest, and it can undermine the investigation before the first interview begins.
Legal involvement still matters but it plays a different role than conducting the investigation itself. [See Where specialist consultants are better below for what that distinction looks like in practice, and the comparison table for when legal counsel should be brought in.]
Where specialist consultants are better - and why
Employee willingness to speak
When witnesses know they are being interviewed by a lawyer, particularly one engaged by the company, they become careful. They ask whether they need their own counsel. They weigh their words.
With a specialist consultant, employees tend to speak more openly. They understand that the investigator’s role is solely to understand what happened, and that the investigator has no other relationship with the organisation. That distinction changes what surfaces, and it changes the quality of the findings.
How trauma affects the brain — and why it matters for investigations
When a person experiences a threatening or traumatic event, the brain’s stress response system takes over. The prefrontal cortex – responsible for logical sequencing and narrative coherence – is partially suppressed. The amygdala, which processes fear and threat, becomes dominant. Memory is encoded in fragments: sensory details, emotional states, isolated moments. The linear narrative that investigators expect is often simply not how the brain stored what happened.
Consider a situation that commonly arises in investigations. A complainant is interviewed about incidents spanning several months. She can describe specific conversations in precise detail – the words used, the tone, where she was sitting. But she cannot say with confidence whether a particular incident happened in March or May, and her account of the sequence shifts slightly between interviews.
A lawyer, trained to establish chronology, will ask her to start from the beginning. She tries. The account becomes halting, uncertain, harder to follow. The gaps in the timeline become more visible. By the end of the interview, her credibility is in question.
A trauma-informed investigator approaches the same interview differently. She is asked to start where she feels comfortable – with whatever is clearest, whatever comes first. The account that follows is detailed, specific, and consistent where it matters. The investigator understands that her brain encoded the emotional and sensory content of what happened, and that the chronological scaffolding did not survive intact. That is not inconsistency. That is a textbook stress response.
These patterns – fragmented chronology, partial disclosures, accounts that shift slightly in the retelling – are well-documented responses to how trauma is stored and retrieved. Misreading them does not just harm the individual. It produces findings that are fundamentally flawed, and recommendations that miss what actually happened.
Specialist consultants trained in trauma-informed practice know how to conduct interviews that work with these realities rather than against them. They know how to create conditions in which a complainant can give the fullest account they are able to give. They know how to interpret what they hear accurately.
The adversarial frame
Legal training is adversarial by design. That is appropriate in litigation. In a fact-finding investigation, it tends to get in the way.
Lawyers also tend to operate formally – structured questions, careful documentation of every exchange, an atmosphere that signals consequence. For some witnesses, particularly junior employees or those from cultures where authority carries significant weight, that formality is itself a barrier. They answer what is asked, volunteer nothing, and leave the room having said far less than they know.
People who feel they are being cross-examined stop telling you things. They answer the question asked and nothing more. The person who might have offered the most useful context decides the risk is not worth it. You end up with a record of what could be established rather than a picture of what occurred – and those are not always the same thing.
Specialist consultants approach interviews differently. Everyone in the room – complainant, respondent, witness – is there to help establish what happened. Getting that right matters more than winning a point.
Regulatory alignment and Singapore context
Specialist consultants working in this space understand the regulatory landscape — the Employment Act, the Workplace Fairness Act, the Tripartite Advisory on Managing Workplace Harassment, and the Tripartite Standard on Grievance Handling, and design investigations that are consistent with it.
They also bring something beyond the investigation itself. A Catalyse investigation does not stop at laying out what was found – our reports include a clear, reasoned finding on whether the conduct breached the organisation’s policies, on the balance of probabilities, giving you a defensible basis for the decisions that follow. Where policies are unclear, where grievance processes have gaps, or where the organisation needs to understand how to better prevent and respond to harassment, we will usually fold this into the report too. A law firm will tell you what your legal exposure is. A specialist consultant will help you fix the underlying problem.
In Singapore’s workplace culture – where hierarchy, face, and relational dynamics shape how people communicate – cultural fluency is an important consideration. It affects whether people feel safe to speak, how their accounts are interpreted, and whether the investigation’s recommendations are workable in context.
Cost and timeline
Law firm investigations are billed at legal rates. For a matter involving several witnesses and a multi-day process, the cost climbs quickly. Specialist consultants typically work on a scoped engagement basis, and for many investigations the cost is lower – though this varies by matter and should be discussed upfront.
Timeline matters too. Employees are waiting for a resolution. Uncertainty affects productivity, morale, and in cases where complainant and respondent are still working in proximity. Specialist consultants move faster, because this is their core work.
External legal counsel vs specialist consultant: a comparison
External legal counsel | Specialist consultant | |
Cost | High; billed at legal hourly rates | Generally lower; varies by matter and scope |
Timeline | Slower; competing with broader legal practice | Faster; investigation is the core work |
Primary lens | Legal risk and defensibility | Workplace fairness and fact-finding |
Conflict of interest | Common; often the company’s existing legal adviser | None; no advisory relationship with the organisation |
Employee willingness to speak | Often guarded; legal process signals adversarial stakes | Generally higher; investigator is seen as neutral |
Trauma-informed practice | Rarely; not standard legal training | Yes; central to how interviews are conducted |
Regulatory alignment | Variable; depends on employment law specialisation | Strong; Employment Act, WFA, Tripartite frameworks applied routinely |
Beyond the investigation | Legal advice on exposure and proceedings | Policy review, grievance process improvement, prevention advisory |
Best suited for | Legal advice, privilege, post-investigation proceedings | Conducting the investigation itself |
When legal involvement is needed - and what role it should play
There are situations where legal involvement is clearly necessary. If litigation is threatened or underway, if the conduct alleged is criminal, at board level, or where the matter spans multiple jurisdictions.
If privilege over the investigation findings is a priority, this should be discussed with your lawyers early – the structure of the engagement, not simply who conducts the investigation, determines whether privilege applies.
But legal involvement and conducting the investigation are two different things.
The investigation is a fact-finding exercise. It requires trauma-informed interviewing, procedural fairness, and the kind of neutrality that gets witnesses talking. What lawyers do with those findings – advising on legal exposure, managing litigation risk, pursuing or defending a claim – is a separate exercise that comes after.
A well-conducted investigation report is, if anything, better raw material for legal proceedings than one conducted through an adversarial lens. The facts have been surfaced properly. The process has been documented. The findings will hold up.
In practice, this means Catalyse conducts the investigation and produces the report. If legal action follows, your lawyers take it from there. The two roles are complementary; they should not be conflated. In many cases, organisations end up engaging both – which is the right division of labour, and ensures the investigation itself stays smooth and comprehensive.
Who should you call?
For most workplace harassment and misconduct investigations, the optimal choice is often a specialist consultant – someone whose sole mandate is to establish what happened, with no other relationship to the organisation and no competing frame.
Bring in legal counsel where litigation, criminal conduct, privilege, or post-investigation legal exposure are in play.
Working with Catalyse
Catalyse handles workplace harassment and misconduct investigations across Singapore and the region. Our team combines legal training, deep experience in workplace harassment, and long-standing work with survivors, organisations, and policymakers. We are trauma-informed, fluent in Singapore’s regulatory framework, and practised across industries and organisational cultures.
If you have a complaint on your desk and are weighing your options, we are happy to have that conversation before you commit to a path.
We offer a complimentary 45-minute consultation for organisations.
📩 enquire@catalyse.sg
By: Corinna Lim, Pauline Gan, Loong Seng Onn
Catalyse Consulting