# Draft Investigation Plan For Workplace Harassment And Retaliation Complaint > Guides the drafter in preparing a privileged investigation plan memorandum that addresses investigator neutrality, preservation obligations, witness sequencing, prior-complaint review, and privilege considerations. - Skill: `finchipaiorg/draft-investigation-plan-for-workplace-harassment-and-retali` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add finchipaiorg/draft-investigation-plan-for-workplace-harassment-and-retali` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/finchipaiorg/draft-investigation-plan-for-workplace-harassment-and-retali/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: FinchipAIOrg (https://skillmd.com/u/finchipaiorg) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/finchipaiorg/draft-investigation-plan-for-workplace-harassment-and-retali --- # Skill: Draft Investigation Plan for Workplace Harassment and Retaliation Complaint ## 1. Subject-matter triage - Treat the complaint, supporting company records, and any attached email or messaging materials as the operative record for planning. - Determine whether the plan is being drafted for internal HR response, counsel-led investigation, or a hybrid process; the privilege posture and investigator selection depend on that posture. - Identify whether the complaint includes harassment, retaliation, or both, and whether the allegations implicate managers, HR, or bystanders; tailor the witness map accordingly. - Flag immediately any request for a neutral investigator, any prior complaint about the same respondent, or any preservation risk tied to electronic systems with deletion settings. ## 2. Failure modes the skill is correcting - The plan assumes investigator neutrality without testing whether the proposed investigator has a prior relationship, reporting tie, or other credibility issue. - The plan jumps to interviewing the respondent before the complainant’s account, documents, and corroborating witnesses are captured, creating avoidable contamination risk. - The plan ignores preservation of email, chat, collaboration tools, shared drives, and other systems that may overwrite relevant evidence during the investigation. - The plan omits review of earlier informal complaints or HR responses involving the same respondent, leaving the employer-defense analysis incomplete. - The plan fails to preserve privilege from the outset, causing interview notes, draft reports, or internal communications to be treated as ordinary business records. - The plan neglects possible insurance notice obligations or other reporting deadlines triggered by a formal complaint. - The plan lists tasks without assigning an owner, sequence, or timing anchor, making the investigation unworkable. ## 3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply - Investigator neutrality: use an investigator with no material prior personal or professional relationship that would reasonably call impartiality into question; document the neutrality assessment in the memorandum. - Employer response framework: assess whether the employer acted with reasonable care to prevent and correct alleged harassment or retaliation, including whether reporting channels existed and were usable. - Retaliation framework: evaluate whether the complaint, timing, supervisory actions, discipline, scheduling changes, or access restrictions suggest protected activity followed by materially adverse treatment. - Preservation duty: once a complaint or threatened claim is reasonably anticipated, preserve potentially relevant information and suspend deletion or overwrite processes for covered custodians and systems. - Privilege doctrine: when counsel directs the investigation, structure the process to support attorney-client privilege and work-product protection; limit distribution and label communications accordingly. - Insurance notice: review any employment-practices or management-liability policy for prompt notice requirements tied to a formal complaint or potential claim. - Common investigation practice: document each factual step, maintain a clean interview chronology, and separate fact-finding from conclusions. ## 4. Analytical scaffolds - Scope first: define the alleged conduct, time period, locations, systems, and actors to be covered; distinguish the harassment theory from the retaliation theory. - Investigator selection: - identify the proposed investigator; - test for prior relationships, reporting lines, or prior involvement; - state whether the investigator may proceed or should be replaced. - Complaint-history review: - search for prior informal complaints, manager escalations, exit interviews, HR notes, or hotline contacts involving the same respondent; - note how each prior matter was handled; - assess the defense significance of any pattern, prior notice, or corrective action gap. - Preservation plan: - identify relevant custodians, repositories, devices, and platforms; - list likely sources of emails, chats, texts, shared drives, badge/access records, calendars, HR files, and performance records; - direct a litigation hold and suspension of auto-delete or retention overwrite features where needed. - Document collection plan: - specify which records are needed before interviews and which can be gathered in parallel; - assign collection responsibility to counsel, HR, IT, or the business lead as appropriate. - Witness sequencing: - interview the complainant first unless there is a documented reason not to; - collect and review corroborating documents next; - then interview corroborating witnesses identified from the record; - interview the respondent last. - Interview protocol: - define the core topics for each witness category; - include confidentiality and non-retaliation reminders; - preserve notes in privileged form if counsel is directing the process. - Timeline: - set an opening date for the hold and initial collection; - set target dates for interviews, interim check-ins, and the final memorandum; - include any insurance notice deadline or external reporting milestone. - Recommendation framing: - each recommendation should identify the action, the responsible role, and the timing anchor; - keep the recommendation operational, not abstract. ## 5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships - When multiple allegations, respondents, locations, or time periods are present, separate them before analysis and assign the relevant witness set and document set to each. - When conduct spans before and after the complaint date, distinguish pre-complaint harassment evidence from post-complaint retaliation evidence. - When the same manager is implicated in both the underlying conduct and the response, treat the response chain as a separate investigative thread. - When records exist across HR, IT, and line management, note which source controls each fact and which source is corroborative. - When preservation, insurance notice, and interview timing collide, prioritize hold issuance and evidence stabilization before substantive interviews beyond the complainant. ## 6. Output structure conventions - Draft as a privileged attorney-client investigation plan memorandum. - Use a conventional memorandum shape: purpose and scope, privilege and confidentiality statement, investigator selection and neutrality assessment, complaint-history review, preservation and litigation hold, document collection, witness plan and sequencing, interview protocols, timeline, insurance notice, and action items. - Mark the memorandum privileged on each page or in the header/footer if the format permits. - Write in direct planning language, not in narrative report style; the memorandum should tell the reader what to do, in what order, and why. - Include an explicit recommended actions section at the end with imperative steps, responsible roles, and timing anchors. - Do not speculate beyond the provided complaint file and company records; identify information gaps and state what must be obtained to close them. - If the investigation plan relies on a legal proposition, name the governing rule, doctrine, or policy basis rather than stating the conclusion alone.