The one where they hired a lawyer (that i think was infamous for protecting the Canadian logging industry)?
Yeah. That is always bullshit. Unless you are doing REALLY illegal stuff AND are documenting it to an insane level, lawyers are not mandatory reporters. Their job is not to prove there was no wrongdoing. Their job is to investigate what risk the company is at to wrongdoing that, as far as they have been told, did not exist. And their report is the risk based upon documented evidence and interviews with employees.
So when a company does a third party investigation from a law firm they paid? They are not getting a clean bill of health. They are having all potential risks identified and doing what they can to mitigate that.
A very good friend of mine who tends to be on the other side of the court room when this stuff happens likes to describe it as: Paying a law firm to investigate your company is not an STD test. It is confirming that you don’t have any weeping sores and making sure you have plausible deniability for why all your condoms keep “falling off” while you stealth people.
But people hear “We investigated ourselves and found no sign of wrongdoing” and think it means… anything.