Comments on: What doesn’t go in a witness statement

By: Naomi

Naomi — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:46:57 +0000

I agree with the first point. Respondents are often offenders here: the person who conducted the disciplinary hearing, for example, is required to say “He said… and then I asked him… HIs reply was….” – and all that’s happened is the person drafting the statement has read the notes of the meeting and rewritten them in narrative form. There’s no point. Much better to say something like “My notes of the meeting are at page [xxx],” or if you’re the claimant “The HR assistant’s notes of the meeting are at page [xxx], and they are mostly accurate. The only bit I disagree with is…”

I’m not convinced about having 2 competing versions of the witness statement – it sounds a bit confusing to me.

By: Jonathan Halsey

Jonathan Halsey — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:25:37 +0000

Useful tip: omit anything that is basically a paraphrase of undisputed documents – it saves time. Additionally, if a statement does contain large portions of undisputed material, you could – with the client’s consent – bring a shorter tracked changes version to the hearing (with visible changes so it can clearly be seen what has been deleted) & draw to the ET’s attention that that is what you’re doing.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:19:16 +0000

The exception I have seen to the rule about legal argument in witness statements is where a CAB or Law Centre has been able to help a litigant in person with their statement, but doesn’t have the resources to provide representation or write full submissions.

Sometimes they will put a certain amount of legal argument into the witness statement on the basis that it is better to have it in the wrong place than not to have it at all.

In an ideal world, this would not be necessary. But sometimes it is the least worse alternative.