Investigating Before Deciding on a High-Risk Termination

Composite Study. Representative matters drawn from our engagements. Details are composites and do not describe any single client.

The Situation

A US healthcare technology company of roughly 5,000 employees, facing overlapping discrimination and retaliation allegations at the moment it was preparing to end an employee’s tenure for performance.

Engagement: independent workplace investigation, HR and manager training, policy and process counsel, and a negotiated separation.

The Challenge

A documented performance problem. A company ready to act. Then the allegations against management, arriving together and arriving first: race discrimination, age discrimination, hostile work environment, retaliation.

That combination is the hard one. Act without addressing the allegations and the timing itself hands the employee a retaliation claim. Wait indefinitely and the performance problem festers while leverage drains away. Two questions have to be answered before anything else: is any of it substantiated, and can the company defend its next move.

Our Approach

An independent investigation into every allegation. Interviews, document review, and a real test of whether the record supported the decision or whether management’s own conduct had created exposure. Some allegations did not hold up. Others pointed to genuine gaps, including inconsistent documentation and conduct that called for training the company had not done.

Findings alone would not have been enough. We set out what to fix and how, which meant manager training tied to the specific conduct the investigation surfaced rather than a generic refresher, and a rebuilt process for how performance issues get documented and complaints get investigated. Only then did the separation question come back, this time against a factual record.

We drafted the separation agreement and scripted the talking points for the conversation itself, line by line, so that nothing said in the room would undercut the record.

The Results

The separation was completed through a negotiated agreement. No lawsuit, no charge filed. The investigation record gave the company a defensible position at the table, and the training and policy work closed the gaps that had made the original allegations plausible in the first place.

Key Takeaway

A termination decision made under a live complaint is not decide-then-defend. It is investigate, then decide. The investigation is not a delay tactic. It is what makes the eventual decision defensible, and it is often the difference between a clean exit and an EEOC charge.