September 02, 2025

 Jade Potot-Warren

law departments compliance best practices trends

The adage ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ is a fitting one when it comes to the possibility of business misconduct, financial fraud, and regulatory breaches. As countless cases demonstrate, no matter how seemingly watertight a business’s reporting policy is, failure remains a real possibility if the policy isn’t backed up by consistent and prompt investigations. And, given that the burden of regulatory compliance work is overwhelming for an increasing number of law departments, the risks are surging.

It goes without saying that this is an area of work that involves tremendous financial, legal, business, and reputational risks and requires the utmost sensitivity. However, it is also clear that much of the effort required does not require a legal practitioner.

Whether it’s a regulatory compliance investigation or an employment litigation matter, there are numerous steps to complete before any legal input can happen. Consider just a few of them: case file creation, triaging reports according to complexity and severity, determining deadlines, and managing the evidence gathering process, including the cadence of interviews and initial communications with stakeholders. Yet many businesses leave this work in the hands of lawyers and investigators.

Doing so invites major bottlenecks that not only hinder the timely resolution of investigations but also detract from the time and attention that law department professionals can give to other work. Moreover, when employees who report wrongdoing don’t hear back promptly or aren’t kept updated, they inevitably feel devalued…and word will get out. Once it does, trust plummets and reporting dwindles, creating exactly the kind of culture that these investigations policies seek to prevent.

Avoiding these pitfalls is a matter of five key steps:

1. Establish a clear workflow: Before tackling anything else, ensure you have a clear and well-defined process for how the investigation will take place. Document what information is needed, what timelines are in play, which stakeholders are involved, and determine how each phase of the investigation will be carried out.
2. Simplify and standardise: A lack of standardisation increases the risk of errors and omissions and invites redundant work. Using standardised requests and checklists tailored to the specific circumstances can prevent this. It will also enhance your service-level reporting and metrics by creating collatable, easy-to-understand data that can give you meaningful insight into trends, successes, and opportunities for optimisation.
3. Establish champions in key areas of the business: A critical step to reducing internal friction and building a culture of confidence is making sure that everyone knows the right person to contact for support and escalations.
4. Embed a culture of continuous improvement: Implement a rigorous QC process and a channel for open and continuous feedback that exposes risks before their impact occurs. Alongside this, maintain detailed and up-to-date playbooks that support a strong knowledge base and seamless handovers when required.
5. Communicate clear SLAs and accountability frameworks: Remember: If no one knows what deliverables exist or when they’re due, things will go wrong – and they will keep going wrong. Similarly, reporting and escalation lines amongst legal and investigative staff should be clear to ensure accountability for a fair, complete, and timely investigation, every step of the way.

A Final Key Point

These five steps are crucial to optimising investigative work, but the time and cost burdens of keeping such work in-house aside, there is also a real risk arising from an actual – or even perceived – lack of fair process or impartial decision-making. As the SRA has cautioned, ‘In-house solicitors can experience pressures from senior leaders to take steps or reach conclusions that inappropriately pre-empt or influence the outcome of an investigation.’

Moreover, as noted by the 2025 SWIS, with 61.6% of organisations conducting internal whistleblowing investigations and only 38.79% of organisations having fully trained investigators, it’s understandable that questions may arise about the impartiality of such processes and the need for external expertise.

As such, the simplest, fastest, and most effective way to operationalise these key steps is by enlisting an independent service provider with an optimised and battle-tested approach. Doing so is not a cost, but rather a strategic investment. In addition to immediately reducing the myriad risks associated with a poorly conducted investigation, it also liberates your lawyers from the administrative and ‘transactional’ elements of the investigative workflow. After all, your lawyers should be practising law. Let someone else handle the paperwork – and all that comes with it.