5 Tips for Witness Interview Safety

Do you conduct witness interviews?

Perhaps you work for a law firm or do certain types of litigation, or maybe you conduct witness interviews for internal investigations?

For example, California mandates that you have an effective investigation process, when a workplace violence complaint comes forward, and that involves interviewing witnesses, interviewing the complainant, interviewing the respondent.

It can also be for things like sexual harassment and other workplace type situations.

We're going to talk about 5 steps you can take to keep yourself safer while you do your witness interviews.

Look, the whole purpose of doing the witness interview is to develop information. But if something happens to you, that's not going to be where the interview goes.

So you have to be responsible for this.

Now, how do I know this?

I spent 30 years conducting witness interviews both for civil and criminal litigation, as well as internal investigations, and witnesses do get emotional.

They can get angry over the process of doing witness interviews.

When you're doing an internal investigation, the respondent can get very upset, or even the complainant can get really upset.

So you have to be mindful of your safety.

If you find this information helpful, and if you would like some help with witness interviews, whether it's training in how to do them, whether it's how to do them safely, go ahead and schedule a call, and we'll spend some time discussing what your needs are, and come up with an approach where we can address those.

Safety step number one.

Always position yourself between the person you're interviewing and the doorway or any other way of getting out of the location where you're doing the interview.

You never, ever want to conduct a witness interview or an interview with a complainant or respondent where they are closer to the door, because quite simply, they can block your exit and your chance of being able to leave that room safely.

That's because once they do, you're trapped, and to be trapped is not safe.

So obviously, we never, ever want to let someone be between us and the doorway when we're conducting a witness interview.

The 2nd step for safety is to consider the fact that there is safety in numbers.

Oftentimes when you can, it's really beneficial to have a 2nd person with you when you conduct the interview.

Sometimes that can be to take notes for you so you can focus on the actual give and take of the interview, but in addition to that, there's safety in numbers, and if there are 2 of you there, the person you're interviewing, again, be it a witness, or be it the complainant or the respondent, is much less likely to launch a physical attack, to go off on you, when there's 2 of you.

So when you can, it's really beneficial to conduct your interviews with a 2nd person. We used to call that 2nd chair for the interview.

Now, this is really important if you're doing a cold call witness by going out into the field, going to their home, knocking on the door, and getting them to talk to you.

That's the way that I used to do a lot of the witness interviews during the 30 years that I did, both litigation work, and also internal investigations.

I would often go out to a person's home or to their workplace. And if you have a 2nd person with you, it makes it that much safer to do.

The 3rd important safety step for you when you're conducting witness interviews is to have an exit strategy.

In other words, how can you go and where can you go if you need to in order to be safe if something happens in the space where you're conducting the witness interview?

You could be in a conference room and maybe you need to get out through the door and look at where the front door is, or maybe you need to go to a separate room, but you need to identify that location so that you can keep yourself safe while you're doing the witness interview.

Again, the likelihood of something happening during witness interview is not great, but it can happen and it does happen that the person you're interviewing gets agitated, gets upset, gets angry, and launches a physical attack.

So go ahead and spot out where you can go.

Maybe it's somebody that you can go to and get their help, again, going back to safety and numbers, but you have to think about a way out.

And then don't just go, oh good, there's a door over there. Visually pace out how many steps it is, pace out if you need to go from one location to another to get there.

But visualize that route and what you need to do in order to get there as quickly as possible.

The 4th tip is to trust your instincts.

When it comes to fight or flight, our genetic programming, a lot of times we let our brain talk us out of that little voice that we hear that says I don't feel safe.

When it comes to doing witness interviews or interviewing a complainant or respondent, you need to be safe.

So you have to listen to that voice.

And if that voice is telling you, there's something off about this person. There's something off about this situation.

Don't dismiss it.

Listen to that voice, and take whatever safety steps you need to at that moment.

Perhaps that's to conduct a witness interview outdoors, maybe on the front porch. It could be to go and locate a 2nd person and have them come in and do the witness interview with you.It could be identifying your route so that you can leave.

Regardless of what your actions are after you feel that voice.

The key thing is to listen to your instinct and to trust it and to then make decisions based upon that instinct and not to override it.

And finally, for the 5th safety step, it's really important to understand that interview skills translate really well to de-escalation.

So if you are going ahead and doing an interview and the person you're interviewing gets agitated, you can use those same skills you're using for the interview, you can ask questions, you can listen, you can redirect their thought process through the interview process.

And that's really what de-escalation is.

It's taking that person out of the mindset which they've formed, which is to possibly harm you. To get them to calm down, to get things to, to tone down over, And to do it by redirecting the person's thought process where they want to harm you to something else.

And that is a skill that you develop when you conduct witness interviews regularly.

If you would like some help with setting up a program to improve your witness interviews, to level them up, but you really don't know where to start, reach out and schedule a call with me, and we'll discuss where you're at.

We'll look at how you're doing your witness interviews, what areas of improvement we can make, and we'll set up a plan to go from there.