Mediator and Workplace Investigator
About Hallie Von Rock
Hallie Von Rock works as a neutral throughout California: mediating disputes for attorneys and their clients, and conducting independent workplace investigations for employers and their counsel.
Her Background
Hallie Von Rock spent more than two decades representing clients in complex litigation before adding neutral work. Across that career she worked on disputes involving employment, class actions, consumer protection, fraud, and other complex civil matters, which meant learning very different legal issues, industries, and human dynamics one case at a time.
That experience taught her something she carries into every matter now: resolving a dispute takes more than sizing up the legal claims. It takes understanding the evidence, the people involved, the risks each side faces, and the financial, professional, and personal pressures that are often driving the parties’ positions.
Today she brings that perspective to her work as a neutral, serving parties through both mediation and independent workplace investigations.
How She Mediates
Hallie’s approach to mediation is practical, prepared, and persistent. After years of sitting through mediations and settlement negotiations from the advocate’s chair, she has seen how differently each case behaves. Some turn on a close read of the law and the evidence. Others turn on business realities, relationships, risk tolerance, or concerns that never appear in the pleadings. Many turn on all of it at once.
She comes to each mediation without assumptions about what a case is worth or how it should resolve. Her job is to understand each party’s position, the issues underneath the dispute, and the concerns that are standing in the way of settlement.
Hallie Von Rock knows what attorneys and their clients need from a neutral. Someone who is prepared, listens carefully, understands the issues, asks useful questions, offers a candid read when it helps, and stays with the parties even when they start far apart.
She serves as a mediator with The Congress of Neutrals and provides mediation services in matters referred through the Contra Costa County Superior Court.
An Independent and Neutral Approach
As an investigator, Hallie’s role is different from an advocate’s. She does not start with a desired outcome or an assumption about whose account is right. Her job is to identify the relevant issues, gather the available evidence, give everyone involved a real chance to be heard, weigh competing evidence objectively, and reach findings the record can support. Her mediation work sharpens this: both roles call for careful listening, thoughtful questions, the ability to understand different perspectives without adopting one too soon, and the discipline to keep assumptions separate from evidence.
Matters she can investigate:
- Discrimination and harassment
- Retaliation
- Bullying and inappropriate workplace conduct
- Complaints involving supervisors, managers, or executives
- Workplace policy violations
- Conflicts of interest and other alleged misconduct
- Complaints involving multiple employees, witnesses, or allegations
- Other sensitive workplace matters that call for an independent review
Investigation services can include:
- Helping define the appropriate scope
- Reviewing complaints and relevant documents and communications
- Conducting witness interviews
- Evaluating the evidence
- Making credibility determinations when necessary
- Preparing written findings or a full investigative report
Workplace Investigations
A workplace investigation can carry consequences well beyond the original complaint. Choices about the scope of the review, the witnesses interviewed, the documents examined, the questions asked, and the findings reached can all matter later, whether the organization is making an employment decision, defending a claim, or showing that it took an employee’s concerns seriously.
Hallie Von Rock brings her employment litigation experience to her work as an independent investigator. Over her career she has investigated and litigated complex workplace disputes involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and other employment issues. That work included interviewing and deposing witnesses, weighing conflicting accounts, reviewing large volumes of documents, assessing credibility, and deciding which facts actually matter to the question at hand.
Why a Well-Built Investigation Matters
Hallie Von Rock brings a distinct perspective to this work through her involvement in Paknad v. Superior Court, a published 2026 California Court of Appeal decision that addressed the attorney client and work product privileges in workplace investigations. An employer had retained an outside attorney to investigate an employee’s complaints of harassment, discrimination, and retaliation; when litigation followed, the employer relied on the thoroughness and independence of that investigation as part of its defense. The Court of Appeal held that, by putting the scope and adequacy of the investigation at issue, the employer waived attorney client privilege and work product protection as to the investigator’s factual findings and information relevant to evaluating how the investigation was conducted.
Seeing that play out firsthand reinforced how much the process matters, not just the conclusion: setting an appropriate scope at the start, following the evidence where it leads, interviewing the witnesses needed to understand the allegations, weighing evidence that points in different directions, making careful credibility calls when necessary, and grounding every finding in the record. An investigation should be built with the expectation that both the process and the findings may one day need to withstand independent review.