Intensifiers are adverbs intended to strengthen adjectives.

For example, writing ‘very unfair’ instead of ‘unfair’ should suggest that whatever you are referring to is more than ordinarily unfair. Similarly, you might write ‘extremely unfair’ or ‘astonishingly unfair’.

Unfortunately, due to a quirk of human psychology, this does not work. It actually has the reverse affect. To a reader sentences like:

Their behaviour was extremely unreasonable.
That was very unfair.
I was tremendously upset.

Are less convincing and less strong than:

Their behaviour was unreasonable.
That was unfair.
I was upset.

The point of a witness statement is to say what happened – to the best of the witness’s knowledge, and to the extent that what that witness knows is relevant to the questions in dispute. Of course, that doesn’t mean you must confine yourself to statements that the other side will deny: plenty of what is not disputed is nevertheless relevant to what is disputed. And you want your witness statement to tell a story that is easy to understand, so you will need to put in some background anyway. So inevitably you will need to include a certain amount that is uncontroversial. Your statement might start something like this:

I first joined Widge It! (then called ‘The Widget Company’) as a technical assistant in the finishing department at the age of 17. I achieved various promotions, and by 2008 I was Head of quality assurance, with a team of 30 reporting to me either directly or indirectly. Until the events that led to my dismissal, my annual appraisals had all been either good or excellent, and I had an unblemished disciplinary record. I was given a loyal service award in 1995 after 25 years service.

Probably the other side won’t deny any of this. But the tribunal needs to know it, and someone’s got to tell them.

But the witness statement shouldn’t include:

The first of these is dealt with in more detail in Show, don’t tell. The tribunal will make up its own mind whether what happened was disgraceful, or unfair or whatever. Once they’ve heard all the evidence, you may want to suggest certain conclusions in your closing submissions – but putting this in a witness statement is premature, and likely to be distracting.

As to the second: again, the place for legal argument is in submissions at the end of the case.

The last category is a particularly tempting mistake. Your former line-manager says something in his statement you know is wrong, and you reckon you can prove it – perhaps there’s a document that shows he can’t be right. Why shouldn’t you point out the inconsistency in your witness statement?

The answer is that it isn’t evidence. It’s not part of what you say happened – it’s comment on some of the other evidence. A good practical reason not to put it in your witness statement is that, if you do, you give the other witness prior warning. If there’s a killer document in the bundle that shows your former line manager to be a liar, you’ll get much more out of it if he hasn’t noticed it until you take him to it in cross-examination.

In all three cases, the underlying point is that witness evidence should be confined to what you are able to say because because you were there. That’s what it is to be a witness. You’ll get your chance for comment and legal argument, but it comes later.

Most of us have words and phrases that we overuse.

For example, I have a tendency to start sentences with ‘clearly’ when writing submissions: as in ‘Clearly my client is right and should win his case’.

This is not a good idea. Either something is clear or it isn’t. If it is, it doesn’t need saying. If it isn’t, suggesting that it is will hinder rather than help. Even if, occasionally, ‘clearly’ is useful, overusing it is distracting and annoying.

So, during the editing phase, I go through and take out most of the ‘clearly’s

Different people have different ticks. It is worth figuring out what yours are and keeping an eye on them.

Should you prepare a list of questions? This is a question on which reasonable people disagree. The argument is basically this.

Those against say a list of prepared questions reduces your ability to adapt to changing circumstances in court. At worst, you might dry completely when the witness turns in a direction you’re not expecting. Or more subtly, you fail to adjust your manner or style to the witness because you are reading out your prepared questions and not paying enough attention to the responses. And reading out a list of questions can make you sound wooden.

Those in favour point out that producing a list of questions allows you to prepare in a degree of detail that is hard to achieve in any other way.

There are excellent advocates on either side of this issue. Probably the best advice for those who appear in court regularly is to experiment with your approach until you find what suits you best – which may well be somewhere between the two positions.

We are both list-makers. If you’re an experienced advocate and you belong to the other camp, then (quite apart from the fact that this blog isn’t really written with you in mind) we wouldn’t dream of trying to convert you: you’ve found what suits you.

But if you’re a beginner, or you’re representing yourself, or you only appear in the tribunal very occasionally, we do recommend lists of questions. It’s much better to risk sounding a bit wooden, than to miss out a crucial topic, or annoy the tribunal by coming back to the same territory over and over. A written list can also have the advantage that – if you’re representing – you may have time to run your questions past your client before you cross-examine.

Black. Or blue. Or dark purple, if you like.

The only really important thing to avoid is using a light pastel colour, which will not photocopy properly. Light pink, I have recently found, is completely unsuitable

This is a post mainly for law students volunteering for FRU, and others very early in their careers.

Let’s assume you’re a brilliant lawyer. You understand and can reconcile all the appellate decisions on indirect discrimination. Equal pay holds no terrors for you. TUPE is an open book. You even understand the assumptions underlying the ‘simplified approach’ to calculating a pension loss.

Then you conduct your first case in the employment tribunal (or wherever, in fact – but this blog is about employment tribunals). It’s the most bog-standard unfair dismissal with no tricky law in it at all; but you come away crushed, feeling you’ve made a total idiot of yourself.

Why? Does this mean you’re not cut out to be an advocate after all? Should you pack it in?

No. It’s because easy things are harder than hard things.

There’s a whole host of minor conventions to do with conducting hearings. Things like where you sit, the degree of formality with which you address the tribunal, what you say to witnesses, how you refer to documents in the bundle, how you deal with a witness who asks you questions instead of answering yours, what you do if client tries to speak to you while you are cross-examining or making submissions, etc etc. Some of them you may have picked up in law school simulations. This blog and the book it supports aim to demystify a lot of them. But until you’ve got some real-life experience behind you, you’re bound to stumble from time to time. And when you do – however little it matters in itself – you are quite likely to feel disproportionately humiliated.

Blame the species. We’re highly hierarchical animals, with a strong commitment to ‘belonging’; and we typically express belonging by conforming to minor rules that don’t much matter in themselves. That’s why small errors of etiquette are so toe-curling. Not because they really matter or have caused any real damage to your client’s prospects of success: but because you have displayed your ignorance of the rules of a group you are trying to belong to. It doesn’t help that all this happens in public.

Reading this post won’t make these feelings go away. But you don’t have to panic or draw extravagant conclusions. It doesn’t make you stupid that you don’t know how something is usually done when you’ve never done it before; it just makes you a beginner. The difficult stuff you find easier – understanding the law, spotting the inconsistencies between the documents and what the witnesses say, that sort of thing – does actually matter more in the end.

And meanwhile: every mistake you wince to think of is a mistake you’ll never make again. Viewed that way, every one is an asset.