When considering a case a tribunal will inevitably take some account of the way people act during the litigation. This is one reason why it’s best to behave in a sensible and reasonable manner.

It is particularly important not act in a way that directly undermines your case. If, for example, the respondent says that you were dismissed for acting in an aggressive and angry manner, try not to blow up during cross-examination. And, if you were dismissed for persistent lateness (which you deny), it is vital that you not turn up half an hour after the hearing was supposed to start.

Chronological order – that is to say, date order – is the only way to arrange the papers in a hearing bundle. Anything else will be confusing at best, enraging at worst.

Admittedly part of the reason why this is the best way to arrange the papers is that it is the most common way. That’s not an argument that always works: the most common way to sing is out of tune, after all, and the most common way to paint a sash window is so that the top half is jammed permanently shut. But when it comes to bundles (like deciding on which side of the road to drive), tedious conformity to usual practice is by far the best thing. The parties’ representatives will have to navigate the bundle at speed in the course of the hearing, and it is much easier to navigate at speed if you know your way around.

The one exception to strict chronological order is the formal tribunal documents – the ET1, ET3, together with any questionnaires and responses, requests for additional information and responses to such requests. It is conventional to put these in a separate section right at the front of the bundle. Some people also put any grievances that are required to found the claim in this section, too, and that’s not a bad idea.

But after that, resist any temptation to subdivide by theme (‘investigation,’ ‘disciplinary proceedings,’ ‘grievance about photocopier incident,’ ‘disciplinary appeal’ etc). Just arrange all the documents in the order in which they were written.

If you’ve bought the book to help you run your own case, you probably won’t need it again once the case is finished and the time for any appeal is past – you’d be very unlucky to need to sue two employers ever, and spectacularly so to need to sue two employers during the lifetime of one edition.

If you don’t need your copy any more, you might think about giving it to your local library or CAB.

‘Evidence’ means any material that helps prove one side’s case or the other’s – what witnesses say, pieces of paper with things written on them (commonly known as ‘documents’), computer files, records of text messages, photographs, CCTV footage, emails, monogrammed handkerchiefs dropped at the scene of the alleged sexual harassment, bloodstained blunt instruments (admittedly these are rare in employment tribunal proceedings) – etc. etc..

It’s a common mistake to think that what witnesses say doesn’t count as evidence: as in “It’s my word against his, but there’s no evidence.” If he says you did and you say you didn’t, that’s evidence on both sides: the tribunal will just have to decide who it finds more believable.

It is a good general rule (probably in life, but certainly in litigation) to make your best points and then stop. It will be very rare indeed that there are more than half a dozen or so really good points in any case. Good points get rarer on appeal: if you find yourself drafting a notice of appeal that runs to more than 4 or 5 separate grounds, the chances are that your appeal is a weak one.

There are exceptions of course. Occasionally there is an employment tribunal decision so bad that there is an almost infinite number of ways of describing what’s wrong with it. If you’re faced with one of those, your task is quite hard: drafting grounds of appeal will feel a bit like performing an autopsy on a frog that’s been through a liquidiser. It’s clearly not a functioning frog any more – it’s frog puree – but how to put a finger on what precisely is wrong with it? But even in that kind of case, you will do better to make your 3 or 4 best points – you only need to win the case once, after all.

Most of this blog (and the book it supports) is written for people who are either representing a client in the employment tribunal, or are representing themselves. The underlying assumption is that if you are a claimant in an employment tribunal case who has an adviser, you can leave running the case to them.

That assumption is not completely right of course. If you are getting free advice, the time your adviser can spend on your case will be limited by the other demands on her time – and demand for free legal advice vastly outstrips supply, so the chances are she’s rushed off her feet. If she’s representing you by way of Legal Help, she will be operating under grossly unrealistic time limits imposed by the Legal Services Commission. And if you’re paying for legal advice, the time your lawyer can spend on your case will be limited by your budget: lawyers charge by the hour.

Any which way, there will be a limit, and probably quite a tight one. Case preparation consumes time at a frightening rate, so if you do everything in your power to limit the time your adviser has to spend on non-essential tasks, or tasks that she is no better qualified than you to do, you will maximise the time she has available for the more difficult stuff.

Present the papers in the most helpful way you can

Read the advice on coping with a large pile of papers. Taking letters out of envelopes, removing staples and paperclips, sorting papers into chronological order, weeding out duplicates, photocopying and hole-punching are all easy tasks – but time-consuming. You’d think it mad to pay anyone £100 or more an hour to sort your laundry, but it is surprising how many people are prepared to pay their lawyers to put papers into chronological order.

Answer questions succinctly

Be as focused as possible in the information you give to your adviser, and the way you answer her questions. In ordinary conversation, a question is very often not so much a request for specific information as a polite cue whose purpose is to make space for you to talk for a bit. If it was your habit to behave in social situations like the ideal witness – just giving a succinct factual answer focused precisely on the question you were asked, and then stopping to wait for the next question – you’d soon stop getting invitations. But your lawyer’s questions are best treated in precisely that way.

Don’t ask your adviser for information you can easily find elsewhere

There are many sources of free information for people going through employment tribunal claims, so try to get the answers to your basic questions that way before paying your lawyer to tell you. A good start is to make full use of this blog – don’t just read the most recent posts: explore the index, have a look at the resources page and the glossary, visit the websites that we link to. You could also ask your local library to get a copy of the book (ask for Tamara Lewis’s Employment Law: an adviser’s handbook too, while you’re about it).

Do some of the work yourself

If you are trying to keep your legal costs down, don’t be shy to ask ‘Is that something I could do myself?’ or ‘Will it save time if I do a first draft?’ when your lawyer tells you that a particular piece of work needs doing. You will certainly save quite a lot of your adviser’s time if you write a good first draft of your witness statement.

If you lose your job or get into a dispute with your employer, checking the small print of your household or car insurance may not be among the first things you think of doing. It probably should be, because you may well have insurance that would cover the cost of legal advice, but you could lose the benefit if you don’t get in touch with your insurer promptly.

The Employment Lawyers Association and the authors have kindly given us permission to reproduce this useful article on legal costs insurance by Camilla Palmer and Joanna Wade, published in the ELA Briefing (June 2008).

We are all highly reliant on technology these days. Most litigation will involve three photocopiers; about three fax machines; at least half a dozen phones (including mobiles) and five computers.

No scientific survey has been conducted, so these numbers may be wrong, but the point stands. We use a lot of technology, for very good reasons.

Always bear in mind that this technology is prone to failure. Normally at the worst possible time.

This is something you have to plan for, which is mostly common-sense. If your computer has vital files and emails on it, make sure it’s backed up – and you know how to get at your files if it crashes. If you have a pay as you go mobile, try to avoid running out of minutes the day before the tribunal. Make sure you have paper for your printer if you’re going to need to print out lots of statements.

Most importantly, try not to put yourself in a position where a technical failure will cause a crisis. This basically means trying to get things done in good time. If your fax breaks while you’re trying to send the ET1 you have a problem. But if it happens a week before the deadline, it’s a small problem. If it happens with an hour left to spare, it’s a very serious one. Similarly, trying to repair a photocopier with epoxy glue is rarely fun, but it’s particularly unpleasant the day before a hearing when you have half a dozen bundles to produce.

On a happy day for employment lawyers everywhere the new edition of Peter Wallington QC’s Butterworths Employment Law Handbook is now available on Amazon.

Known simply as ‘Butterworths’ to most practitioners, it is the standard source of statute law in the tribunal. It is an expensive and dense book. If you are only handling your own claim it is almost certainly not worth it, but if you are an adviser or representative it is one of the most useful books you can have.

It is also worth making sure you have the most recent edition. Employment law produces a bewildering range of new statutes each year and, even more confusing, many of the old favourites are changed and amended as well.

And, if you order it through this site, a small part (about 5%) of the price will be donated to FRU.

The previous post about references focused on what you could do about a bad reference.

Another question that arises is whether you can make a reluctant employer or former employer give you a meaningful reference at all – what can you do if they just say ‘It’s not our policy to give references’ or ‘It’s our policy only to give a factual reference confirming job title and dates of employment’?

Unfortunately, the answer to this will almost always be ‘nothing.’ For some employees at certain points in their careers, at least as much of the value of a particular job will lie in the experience gained as in the money earned. The value of the experience is significantly diminished if your former employer refuses to back you up with confirmation that your responsibilities were what you say they were and you discharged them satisfactorily. Nevertheless, although you have a clear contractual right to your pay, whether or not there was ever a contract in writing, you will only have a contractual right to a fair reference if you had the foresight – and the bargaining power – to write it into your contract when you started.

If you are about to start a new job, and you do feel confident enough to rewrite your contract of employment, you might try inserting something like this:

The Employer will promptly on request by any potential future employer of the employee provide a reference for the Employee confirming the duties undertaken by the Employee, commenting fairly on her performance of those duties, her attendance and her character, and referring as appropriate to her significant achievements in the post. The Employer will give the Employee the opportunity to read and comment on a draft of the reference before it is sent. This clause survives the termination of the employment relationship.

You can tackle this kind of negotiation head on by asking for a meeting and/ or sending a draft amended contract to your new employer with an invitation to them to produce a final draft for your signature. Alternatively, you could try and take advantage of the kind of inertia that employers more often benefit from. Make your changes in manuscript on the contract you have been given to sign, sign it and send it back with a covering letter (keeping a copy of both, of course) saying something like ‘I enclose a signed copy of my contract, with certain amendments which I hope will be acceptable.’

The purpose of the covering letter is to make sure they can’t say later that they didn’t realise you’d made any changes: but if you’re lucky, the HR officer who receives your letter may just file your amended contract and leave it at that. If so, you can take it that your amendments are agreed.