Clerks are the people at the tribunal who handle the administration on the day of the hearing: they take your name when you arrive, collect bundles and witness statements for the tribunal and the witness table, ask whether you want to affirm when you give your evidence, or swear on a holy book, take you to your tribunal room when the tribunal is ready to begin, and so on. They aren’t lawyers, so you can’t expect them to give you legal advice – but they will have a lot of practical information about how the tribunal works, and mostly they are pleasant and helpful. You can ask them, for instance, if you need to pass a message through to the employment judge – for instance to ask for more time to finish negotiating; or if you need to know where the nearest print shop is (they won’t be allowed to do photocopying for you unless told to by an employment judge); or whether the other side has arrived at the tribunal yet; or to find out if there’s a room you can use to meet with the other side for negotiations.

First thing in the morning, until about 10 am, there will be a clerk on the reception desk at most tribunals. At other times, if they are not around, you can probably contact them using the telephone on the reception desk – there will be instructions on or near it about which extension to call.

The opposite of ‘unfair’ is ‘fair’. Not ‘not unfair’.

So write “The Respondent has not shown a fair reason for the dismissal”, rather than “The Respondent has not shown a not unfair reason for dismissal”.

Double negatives aren’t necessarily sinful, but they should not be used without care.

When you think you must have seen all the ways there are to make a bundle inconvenient and annoying to use… along comes a new one.

A tabbed divider card between each document and the next is annoying – because it fattens up the bundle to no purpose, and obscures the sticky-notes that you want to use to mark the most important documents. But normally it’s not much of a problem – all you have to do is remove the divider cards, and you have a usable bundle.

But the advanced bundle-saboteur has thought of this. He’s re-started the pagination at 1 for each tab. Now to identify any page, you need two numbers: the tab number and the page number. So if you take out the annoying divider cards, you can’t navigate the bundle at all. Neat, isn’t it?

Getting familiar with the hearing bundle is one of the most important things you have to do when preparing to represent a client (or yourself) in the employment tribunal.

To do this efficiently, you need to have a range of different reading speeds. Some (often most) of the papers in the bundle will be completely irrelevant to anything you have to argue about, and you can skip over them very fast. Often there will be a few pages that are absolutely key – and by the end of the case, you will have pored over them for hours, decorating them with highlighters and cross-referencing them to other documents. Other pages will have a significant line or two, but mostly not be very interesting.

What this means is that you need to read some documents carefully; skim-read others; and – at any rate on your first pass through the bundle – just note that others are there without reading them at all.

A related point is that you need different reading speeds for different stages of preparation. If the case is new to you, you will probably want to start with the ET1 and the ET3 to find out what the case is all about; then read the witness statements for a bit more detail; and then go through the bundle. But this first read through of everything will probably be quite fast: the pleadings and statements are important, and you are going to have to get to know them well before the end: but at this stage, you just don’t know what the case is about, so you can’t tell which bits to focus on. So don’t read everything as if your life depended on it: just get the big picture. You can fill in the detail later.