Vida L. Thomas 

Vida L. Thomas spent about seven years representing businesses sued by their employees before she realized that she was “a reluctant litigator” at best. In 2000, she largely switched to advising and counseling clients on employment matters and, more and more, to conducting workplace investigations.

By 2010, Thomas was doing investigations virtually full-time. She even helped found the nationwide Association of Workplace Investigators. In 2020, she became the managing partner of Oppenheimer Investigations Group, widely considered one of the best investigation law firms in California.

She has conducted more than 200 investigations for cities, public agencies, large businesses, universities, school districts, hospitals, police departments, the state Assembly, a union, a national social justice nonprofit and Amazon.

“Workplace investigations is a very unique area of practice,” Thomas said. When she began, she thought she knew how to do them from being a litigator. But after a while, she realized she needed to “strengthen a different part of my brain.” She had to become better at empathizing with people quickly, staying open-minded and being humble.

“That’s when I started to understand the role that unconscious bias can play in an investigation,” Thomas said. Those biases can unconsciously influence how one gathers and processes information and can lead to an unfair or incorrect conclusion, she said.

Her investigations conducted for employers typically involve allegations of behavior that, if true, would violate a company’s policies and require taking some action in response. The matters have run the gamut from cases in which two lower-level employees don’t get along and one accuses the other of discrimination or harassment.

She also has investigated harassment claims against judges, state legislators and CEOs. Thomas doesn’t disclose names of clients, but news accounts show that earlier this year, the Oppenheimer group investigated the former chair of the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System and a top Alameda County prosecutor.

Thomas said her biggest case was done for “the largest online retailer.”

News accounts indicate that Oppenheimer Investigations Group was hired in mid-2021 to investigate employee allegations of widespread discrimination, harassment and bullying aimed at women and “underrepresented groups” within the professional services unit of Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services. The investigative report was outlined to company employees in mid-2022.

“That was probably the most wide-reaching investigation that I’ve done here,” she said. It involved interviewing dozens of employees in the U.S. and Asia. Thomas and her colleagues had to deal with employees afraid to come forward, and then assess that information and “communicate it back to the employer in a way that would accurately represent what we had found but also be useful for the employer going forward.”

— Don DeBenedictis