Report Writing

Attorney-Client Privileged Incident Investigations and Investigation Report Writing [Webinar Recording]

Eric J. Conn Leave a comment

On Tuesday, December 15, 2015, Eric J. Conn and Kathryn M. McMahon, partners in Conn Maciel Carey’s national OSHA Practice Group, delivered a webinar regarding “Privileged Investigations and Report Writing: Conduct Better Investigations and Protect the Findings.”

An incident, accident, injury or near miss has just occurred in your workplace; what do you do now?  After the emergency is addressed, one of the most important steps to take is to conduct an investigation, identify the root causes of the incident, and document your lessons learned and recommendations to prevent a similar incident in the future.  However, there may be lots of interested parties who want to get their hands on your investigation report, from OSHA inspectors to plaintiffs’ attorneys, from your competitors to the media, and that report could be used against you in enforcement proceedings, personal injury or wrongful death civil suits, Privileged Webinar Cover Slideor even criminal investigations and prosecutions.  Accordingly, it is critical that incident investigations be thorough, and that investigation reports be prepared carefully and thoughtfully.  Likewise, whenever possible, investigations and investigation reports should be done under the protection of the attorney-client privilege.

This webinar provided employers with the knowledge and tools they need to conduct better incident investigations, draft better investigation reports, initiate investigations under attorney-client privilege, and maintain privilege to avoid disclosure of investigation reports to third parties.

Topics included:

  • Why and how to initiate incident investigations under the protection of attorney-client privilege;
  • How to conduct an effective incident investigation;
  • Best practices for incident report writing; and
  • Steps to take to maintain privilege over incident reports.

Here is a link to a recording of the webinar.

This webinar was the final installment of Conn Maciel Carey’s 2015 OSHA Webinar Series.  Here’s a link to a description and recordings of all the other webinars in that series.  Plan to join us for monthly complimentary OSHA webinars as part of our 2016 OSHA Webinar Series.