Your Next Steps When Facing a License Investigation

The first steps you take after receiving a complaint are the most critical. When you get a call or a letter from the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS), the Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR), or your regulatory board, your gut reaction will be to defend yourself immediately. Remain calm and assess the situation.

You are under intense emotional pressure, and any response you provide—whether over the phone or in a detailed letter—can inadvertently contain information that damages your case later on. Your professional license is your livelihood, and this investigation is a legal matter, not a misunderstanding you can simply clear up with an explanation.

Because of the high stakes, I believe in a two-step strategic response:

1. Do nothing immediately. Take a deep breath and give yourself time to rationally assess the situation.
2. Contact your malpractice carrier and retain counsel. Your attorney will then handle all communication with the licensing authority, ensuring your responses are measured, informed, and legally protective of your interests.

Ultimate success in professional license defense hinges on controlling the flow of information and maintaining a non-emotional distance from the investigator. Don’t let panic dictate your defense.

Learn more about Stacie Rosenzweig here.

You can learn more about our Professional License practice as well as our Legal Ethics and Responsibility practice.

TRANSCRIPT:

“Once you have taken a breath, taken stock of what needs to happen, either you or your representative should contact the person on the other side of the communication. If you get a call, sometimes your first notification that anything is up is a phone call. You’re not obligated to talk to that person right away, even if you happen to answer the phone instead of screening it, because a lot of times state agencies don’t have caller ID that identifies the caller as being part of the agency. It just shows up as a generic phone number from the 608 area code in Madison or it doesn’t show up at all. It’s perfectly fine and acceptable and probably a good idea to say, “Can you please send me what you have in writing? I need some time to think about this and to put together a response.”

And at that point, maybe take stock of your reaction. If it is sheer panic or depression, or if your instinct is to want to send the investigator everything that you’ve ever done for this person, which can be voluminous in certain circumstances, it may make sense to hire counsel for that.

Another thing you may need to do is to put your malpractice carrier on notice. Many malpractice policies have requirements that you notify them at some point, either immediately or when it’s time for renewal, about any complaints that were filed against you. Even if there’s not a requirement to do it immediately, you may have defense coverage available, and in that case, some policies — it can range from $5,000 to $25,000 to $100,000 in coverage. It varies tremendously by the carrier and by the policy, and it may not even impact your deductible. So in those situations, it makes a lot of sense to put your carrier on notice, and they’ll help you get counsel and help you respond in a calm, intelligent, and informed manner, because what you don’t want to do is respond in an emotional matter. You don’t want to be defensive. You don’t want to say, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” You don’t want to carpet-bomb the agency with 40,000 pages of irrelevant information, even though it’s hard not to do that if you think that that’ll be helpful. So put another set of eyes on that.”