Difficult cases

There is a point, in many cases, where the representative starts to feel that he cannot understand the case. The facts are too complex or confusing. The papers are voluminous and some of them seem to have strayed in from a different case. The law is obscure. In any event, despair or panic begins to set in.

The only thing to be done in this situation is to press on.

Everyone who appears in tribunals finds some cases daunting at the outset. Experience doesn’t teach you to understand all cases straight away; it just teaches you not to panic if you are baffled by a case at first, and to have faith in your ability to make sense of it in the end. And it teaches you some concrete techniques for dealing with these cases.

The main thing – after taking some deep breaths, making a cup of tea, and shutting yourself away in a quiet room on your own with the papers – is to find a straightforward task that you know how to do, and then do it steadily for a while. Accept that for a lot of the time you are doing it, you won’t understand the big picture. Have faith that it will gradually come into focus.

A chronology is usually the best place to start. However baffling the case may seem, drafting a chronology will not be difficult. You create a table or open a spreadsheet. Then you go through the papers one at a time, and each time they mention a date that is – or may be – at all important, you write the date in one column and a brief note of what seems to have happened on that date in the next. If you already have a paginated bundle at this point, you add the page number in a third column. If you don’t have a bundle yet, start to arrange the papers into chronological order as you go. Keep a pad of post-its and a yellow highlighter to hand. When you start to see important bits of documents, highlight them and put a post-it on the page.

If you can’t tell what is important and what is not for the moment, don’t worry. Just write down what seems to have happened on each date you come to. You can always delete the unimportant stuff later. Don’t worry about being consistent either: if you begin by noting down every single date you come to, you can be more selective as you go on and gain confidence that you know what is important and what isn’t. If this process starts to give you ideas about other aspects of case preparation – cross-examination questions, for example, or additional documents that you ought to request from the other side – jot down the ideas as you go along.

By the time you have looked at each piece of paper in the case and incorporated into your chronology if it appears to record any dated event, an highlighted what seems to be the important bits of it, you will almost certainly have a much clearer idea what the case is about, and what the evidence is. Your chronology is also an extremely useful document that you will refer to constantly from now on.

By now you are almost certainly feeling much better about the case. Don’t lose momentum. The next thing is probably to attempt a one-page version of your chronology that just shows the bare bones of the story. You can probably recognise them by now. Then do an even shorter list of the dozen or really crucial dates. Pause for a few minutes and commit this last list to memory if you can.

Next, draft a list of issues. Look at the ET1 and the ET3 again. However badly drafted, they will make much more sense in the light of your chronology. Draft a list of issues. If your ET1 is seriously unclear, or misses complaints that you now see it ought to have made, or makes some complaints that are obviously going nowhere, think about amending it. Start to expand your list of issues into the beginnings of a set of written submissions.

Ultimately the key is to slog on. It will – almost always – make sense in the end. Big cases are not harder than small cases, just bigger.

3 Replies to “Difficult cases”

  1. This website is excellent. I have learn a lot from it. This will help with an upcoming case I’m working as representative for a claimant on. Thank you for taking the time!

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