Knowing the law is necessary but not sufficient — HRM5118 is about applying employment law to messy, real workplace situations: an ambiguous harassment complaint, a termination that might look retaliatory, or a new remote-work policy that raises questions no one has answers to yet.
Conducting defensible workplace investigations
HRM5118 covers the structure of a proper workplace investigation into a harassment, discrimination, or misconduct complaint: maintaining confidentiality to the extent possible, interviewing the complainant, the accused, and witnesses separately, documenting findings objectively without predetermined conclusions, and reaching a decision based on a preponderance of the evidence standard. Students practice identifying common investigation failures — leading questions, failure to interview key witnesses, unreasonable delay — that can undermine an otherwise legitimate investigation's legal defensibility.
Termination risk and emerging legal challenges
The course examines wrongful termination risk, including retaliation claims (where a termination follows closely after a protected activity like filing a complaint) and the importance of consistent, documented performance management before termination. It also covers emerging areas of HR legal risk — pay transparency laws, AI in hiring and potential algorithmic bias, and evolving remote/hybrid work policy questions — that existing case law hasn't fully settled, requiring HR professionals to apply established legal principles to genuinely new situations.
Key topics in HRM5118
- Structuring a defensible workplace investigation: confidentiality, interviews, documentation
- The preponderance of the evidence standard in internal HR investigations
- Common investigation failures that undermine legal defensibility
- Retaliation claims and the temporal-proximity risk after protected activity
- Documentation and progressive discipline as termination risk mitigation
- Emerging legal risk areas: pay transparency laws, algorithmic bias in AI hiring tools, remote-work policy gaps
Working on a workplace-investigation case study or a termination-risk analysis?
Our business experts build HRM5118-level coursework with accurate, applied employment-law reasoning.
Worked example: spotting retaliation risk in a termination timeline
- Timeline: Employee files a harassment complaint against their manager on March 1; the same manager issues a poor performance review and recommends termination on March 20
- Legal risk: The close temporal proximity between the protected activity (filing the complaint) and the adverse action (termination) creates a strong inference of retaliation, even if the performance concerns are genuine
- Mitigation: HR should have removed the manager from the employee's reporting line during the investigation and independently verified the performance concerns predate the complaint with contemporaneous documentation
- Lesson: Legally sound reasons for termination can still create liability if the process and timing look retaliatory
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Workplace-investigation case studies and termination-risk analysis assignments.
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Frequently asked questions
Preponderance of the evidence means that, based on all the evidence gathered, it is more likely than not (generally interpreted as more than 50% likely) that the alleged conduct occurred — this is a substantially lower bar than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard used in criminal proceedings. HRM5118 teaches this standard because HR investigators sometimes mistakenly apply a criminal-court mindset to internal investigations, concluding they cannot take action unless there is overwhelming, indisputable proof — when in fact, an internal investigation only needs to determine what more likely than not happened, based on the credibility of witness accounts, consistency of statements, and any corroborating evidence, in order to reach a supportable conclusion and take appropriate action.
Retaliation claims under laws like Title VII don't require proving the underlying complaint was correct — they require showing an employer took an adverse action (like termination) because the employee engaged in a protected activity (like filing a complaint or participating in an investigation). Courts and juries often use temporal proximity — how close in time the adverse action followed the protected activity — as significant circumstantial evidence of retaliatory motive, since a termination happening within weeks of a complaint naturally raises the inference that the two are connected, even if the employer has a separate, genuine performance justification. HRM5118 teaches that this is why HR professionals need to be especially careful with any adverse employment action taken close in time to a complaint or investigation — not because addressing genuine performance problems is wrong, but because the timing itself creates legal risk that requires extra documentation, process rigor, and often a delay or additional review before proceeding, precisely to separate the adverse action from any appearance of retaliation.