Civil Service Investigation: Interview
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Trainer

Associate Professor Lim Lei Theng

Associate Professor Lim Lei Theng was a litigation lawyer at Drew & Napier, one of Singapore’s largest and leading law firms. Her legal practice centered on civil suits and arbitrations involving cross-border transactions. Lei Theng has an LLB (Hons) from the National University of Singapore and an LLM from Harvard Law School.

Now serving as a Deputy Director of the Legal Writing Programme, she convenes and teaches two courses - Introduction to Trial Advocacy and Legal Case Studies, to second-year law students. She also teaches Legal Analysis, Writing and Research course, and assists in coaching the NUS moots teams.

She has taught negotiation and mediation in numerous public workshops in Singapore, Malaysia and Jakarta. Within educational institutions, her teaching has taken her from the law faculty to the LKY School of Public Policy and its predecessor institution. She has also taught in several executive programs on negotiation in conjunction with the NUS Public Policy Program, Conflict Management Group and the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University.

Lei Theng was part of the Committee of ADR under the Ministry of Law that assisted in the establishment of community mediation in Singapore.

Programme

Effective interviewing is a skill that must be learned by special training and the experience that comes from constant practice. Experience cannot be taught, but training in the basic concepts of the proper way to conduct an interview is an invaluable start. Anything that can be learned by “trial and error” can be learned more thoroughly and quickly through systematized study.  The following topics will be covered in this one-day workshop:

•  Overview
•  Legal Rights of The Company and Individual
•  Preserving the balance between the two
•  Questioning Techniques
•  Cross examination techniques
•  Interview vs Interrogation
•  Staging the interview process
•  Creating or dealing with stress
•  Attitudes and authority
•  Framing the interview
•  Catching the liar
•  Detecting lies
•  Getting a response on inconsistencies
•  Documentation and processes
•  Recording the interview – in writing or otherwise
•  Affirming the record
•  Witnesses
•  Putting it together

The spoken word is usually the greatest source of investigative evidence and often is the best evidence in any judicial or administrative forum. No investigation is complete until every important witness, subject, and, when possible, complainant, has been interviewed.

Proficiency in interviewing assures a high degree of accuracy in fact development, helps prove or disprove the issue at hand, prevents surprise testimony from arising later, and may help impeach witnesses who change their stories.

Overview

Management at all level can be involved in an ‘investigation’, usually in relation to a grievance, disciplinary issue, tip-off, complain or report. Often, initial investigations are conducted by internal managers. Though serious cases will be referred to the proper authorities, there are many cases that were managed internally.

Whatever the reason, it is essential that your ‘investigators’ are trained in investigation techniques, to prevent the loss of evidence, unfair or unethical practices.

Of equal importance, investigation technique training will ensure that such matters are dealt with positively by giving all levels of management the confidence that they are able to deal with investigations in a proper manner.

This workshop also ensures that all evidence collected during an internal investigation will be admissible and reliable in any tribunal or criminal/civil court.

“The interviewer has but one ultimate goal, reporting the objective truth.”

Whether interviewers can reach that goal depends in large part on the personal attributes they bring to the interview process. But neither the ordinary experiences of growing up and living among people, nor a formal and extensive school education is of much value in learning how to obtain information from reluctant individuals. Even when interviewing cooperative witnesses, investigators may find it difficult to acquire all the pertinent facts they possess.