Our Services

AWC provides specialist investigative services to professional associations, colleges, employers, and organizations across British Columbia. Each engagement is conducted with the same commitment: gather all available facts, analyze conduct against the applicable standard, and deliver findings that are impartial, transparent, and defensible.

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Regulatory Investigations

Professional associations and colleges rely on investigation committees, typically staffed by volunteers from within the profession, to make disciplinary decisions. Those committees need a complete, impartial, evidence-based investigation before they can act. AWC provides the investigation and the committee makes the decision.

Volunteer investigators, however experienced within their profession, often have no prior frame of reference for serious misconduct. Without specialist support, there is a real risk that conduct goes insufficiently examined, or that procedural gaps undermine the integrity of the entire process. Professional standards matters require particular care: conduct must be measured against the ethical and professional frameworks of the relevant profession, not general standards alone.

AWC manages the full investigative process: case assessment, evidence gathering, structured interviewing, and compliance analysis, to the standard required for regulatory proceedings. Where both individual conduct and organizational or governance failures are in scope, we separate those threads clearly.

Our reports are written with disclosure in mind from the outset. We work alongside legal counsel during the discipline stage where required, providing the evidentiary record that underpins the case for regulatory action.

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Workplace Investigations

When serious misconduct occur like harassment, discrimination, fraud, negligence, or conduct that falls outside normal HR processes, organizations often need an independent investigator with the investigative skills to reach a reliable conclusion.

A workplace investigator’s role is distinct from that of a regulatory investigator: rather than informing a committee’s decision, the workplace investigator determines directly whether conduct breached a legal standard or company policy. That requires genuine independence and AWC investigators are specialist investigators first. Their obligation is to the evidence not the organization or parties.

We gather evidence thoroughly, analyze it against applicable legal and policy standards, and deliver a clear, defensible conclusion. Where matters proceed to tribunal or civil process, AWC can provide evidentiary support at that stage as well.

Organizations typically engage an external investigator when the matter is serious, when no internal investigative capacity exists, or when independence is essential to the credibility of the outcome.

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Investigative Consulting

Not every organization needs AWC to conduct the investigation. Some have internal investigators who need specialist guidance to ensure their process is sound, their findings are defensible, and their approach will withstand scrutiny.

AWC provides investigative consulting to internal investigators and HR teams across the full scope of an investigation: scoping the matter, building the investigation plan, developing interview frameworks and question sets, and establishing the appropriate standards against which conduct should be measured. When we do not take on the role of assigned investigator, we support the people who do.

This service is particularly valuable where organizations have investigative capacity but lack experience with complex or serious matters, or where independent assurance is needed that the process will hold up to challenge.

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Our Approach