Workplace investigation terms for HR and people ops consultancies

Because investigation work often involves sensitive allegations, witness accounts, internal documents, privacy issues and expectations about what your report will or will not decide. If your terms are too generic, clients may assume you are taking on a wider role than you intended, such as legal representation, disciplinary decision-making or ongoing case management. Properly drafted terms help define the service boundaries, explain how information will be handled, and set expectations around confidentiality, reporting and reliance. That is especially important when your consultancy works across different client workplaces and fact patterns.

These terms often address the scope of the investigation, who the client contact is, what information the client must provide, confidentiality expectations, interview and evidence handling, reporting deliverables, timing assumptions, and any limits on how your findings may be used. They may also deal with fees, delays caused by missing information, conflicts issues, and whether follow-up support is included. The exact wording depends on your service model. For example, terms for a fact-finding investigation may look different from terms for a broader HR advisory engagement with reporting and recommendation elements.

The drafting usually depends on how your investigations are run in practice. We will want to understand whether you conduct interviews, prepare findings reports, make recommendations, handle anonymous complaints, store evidence, or work alongside other advisers. It also matters whether you act as an external investigator only or provide broader HR support around the same matter. The right drafting depends on your actual data flows, including what you collect, why you use it and who receives it, so your terms should reflect the real workflow rather than an idealised process diagram or borrowed template.

Often not. Templates may cover basic consulting terms, but they frequently miss the pressure points that arise in investigation work, such as witness confidentiality, handling sensitive allegations, report reliance, document retention, privacy-related disclosures and the boundary between fact-finding and legal advice. They can also fail to match your actual working arrangement with clients. If the document does not reflect the factual context, it may leave room for disagreement when a matter becomes contentious. Tailored terms are usually more useful because they are written around the way your consultancy actually delivers investigations.

Timing depends on how quickly we receive your instructions, any existing terms, and a practical summary of your investigation process. If your consultancy has multiple service lines or different reporting models, that can also affect timing because the drafting may need to account for those variations. Once we have the key information, we prepare the draft, discuss the main clauses with you, and make the included revisions. The service covers the document work itself, but not acting for you in any later dispute with a client about an investigation.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Workplace Investigation Terms service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

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Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.