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It is becoming more and more common for parties and representatives in the employment tribunals to use laptops in the course of the hearing, and most employment judges will now permit you to do this without any show of surprise.

In a short hearing you may do better with an old-fashioned notebook, but in a case running over several days or more, notes of the evidence taken on a laptop (if your or your note-taker’s typing speed is up to it) can be very helpful. There are two main benefits: legibility and searchability. Trying to make sense of someone else’s handwritten notes of evidence is tiring at the best of times – and late at night between days n and n+1 of a hearing is not the best of times. Having completely legible typed notes that you can search for a particular word in an instant (ctrl+F is a much under-used keyboard shortcut) is extremely time-saving and convenient. If you are taking the notes yourself, you can highlight or bookmark key sections as you go along; and you can paste extracts from your notes of evidence into your written submissions.

If you have a voluminous hearing bundle, save an electronic copy of the index on your laptop if you can: then, if you are hunting for a document in the bundle under pressure of time, you may be able to find it faster by searching for a keyword or a date in the index.

You will of course be much better equipped to take advantage of these benefits if you can touch-type fluently.

One might have thought that the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (or both) would provide copies of all the questionnaires at a single location and in a common format on their websites. They don’t. Instead the questionnaires are to be found – with some difficulty – scattered across various websites, in a variety of layouts, and issued by a number of different bodies and government departments (most of which no longer exist).

We have made the complete collection available here. If the questionnaire you want does not include guidance notes, it is worth reading the guidance to one of the other questionnaires: very similar considerations will arise.

Equal pay questionnaire This is a copy of the Statutory Instrument which includes the questionnaire as schedule 1. No guidance notes are included.

Sex discrimination questionnaire This is an 11-page DTI booklet, which includes guidance notes.

Race discrimination questionnaire This is a 15-page booklet, including guidance notes (issued jointly by the Home Office and the Department for Education and Employment).

Disability questionnaire This is a 43-page pdf booklet produced by the Disability Rights Commission (now replaced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission).

Sexual orientation questionnaire This is a 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.

Religion or belief questionnaire Another 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.

Age questionnaire And another 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.

We say in the book (at paragraph 1.19) that there is no restriction on who may appear as a representative in the employment tribunals. This (from 27 April 2007) is no longer true. The relevant provisions are scattered across a number of different pieces of legislation. The Compensation Act 2006 provides at section 4:

(1) A person may not provide regulated claims management services unless—
(a) he is an authorised person,
(b) he is an exempt person,
(c) the requirement for authorisation has been waived in relation to him in
accordance with regulations under section 9, or
(d) he is an individual acting otherwise than in the course of a business.

“Regulated claims management services” sounds very technical, but what matters here is that it includes advice and representation in employment tribunal proceedings.

Legal practitioners (barristers, solicitors, qualified legal executives and a few others as defined by regulation 4 of the Compensation (Exemptions) Order 2007 are exempt from these requirements, as are charities and not-for-profit advice agencies (regulation 6).

Employment consultants must be authorised. To find out if a particular business is authorised, ask it for its authorisation number and then use the search form on the website of the Ministry of Justice.

Note that regulated persons and bodies are bound by the Conduct of Authorised Persons Rules, the Complaints Handling Rules and the Client Account Rules.

Thanks to Adrian Melia of Humane Resources for pointing out this omission.

An American juror (quoted in Disorder in the Court by Charles M Sevilla, publ. Norton 1992.) said ‘That this system works at all is just amazing. Because you people are not unlike children who’ve bagged a moose with a slingshot and dragged the big carcass home and drop it off outside the kitchen door, fully expecting the adults inside to take care of it, in much the same regard, sir, the two of you are going to push your evidence up here to the jury box and expect us to do the same with it.’

That was a criticism of the lawyers’ approach to a jury trial in the United States, but employment tribunals must often feel much the same.

Those who practise in employment tribunals quite often say that submissions are not very important: the case will be won or lost by the evidence. That is true up to a certain point, but if attention is not paid to the task of presenting to the tribunal in a comprehensible and digestible way the story it is being invited to believe, it will feel as if it has been left with a whole moose – skin, horns, hooves and all – and landed with the task of trying to turn it into dinner.

This is what submissions are for. Tell the tribunal which parts of the evidence are important and why it should believe your client rather than the respondent at points of difference. Tell it what the relevant law is, and show it how the law applies to the facts. Make its task easy. Present the moose in neat oven-ready joints.

Maths teachers, much to the frustration of their students, always say to ‘show your working’. They mean that it is not enough to get the right answer, you should also show how you reached it.

This is good advice in legal practice as well. Unless they are obvious, conclusions are not convincing. It is the route you take to the conclusion that will persuade others.

Even more than that, it is often hard to remember in detail how you reached a particular conclusion some time later. This is particularly true if, like most tribunal hearings, there are lots of different issues to deal with.

It is particularly important when dealing with schedules of loss. Unless you write things down at the time, it is almost impossible to remember why a particular number is what it is. And raw numbers are not intuitive. Nobody will be able to look at a final figure, say £16,540, and understand immediately where it comes from. For every figure of compensation claimed, you should set out how it was reached.