What’s a Scott schedule?

Tribunals occasionally ask the parties to prepare a thing called a ‘Scott schedule.’ This sounds very technical, but all it means is a table setting out certain information about the claim. It could take a lot of different forms, depending on the kind of thing in dispute, and it could be short and simple or long and complicated. Often a table in a Word document will do; sometimes it will be easier to use an Excel spreadsheet. (So far as I’ve been able to discover, it’s named after a judge who first came up with the idea.)

This will be clearer in the context of a couple of examples.

In a complicated discrimination case, you might be asked to set out in a table each act of discrimination you are complaining of, with its date, the people involved, when you raised a grievance about it, and whether you say it was direct discrimination, harassment, victimisation or indirect discrimination. So in that case, your table would have 5 columns, headed respectively: ‘Incident,’ ‘date,’ ‘people involved, ‘date of grievance,’ ‘nature of claim.’

If you are complaining of failures, on a number of different occasions, to pay you commission to which you were entitled, you might be asked to set out in a table each month for which you say you were underpaid, the total value of the business you say you should have been given credit for, the clients concerned, the amount of commission you were paid, and the amount of commission you say you should have been paid.

If you’ve just been told to prepare a Scott schedule but not what information to put in it, you haven’t been given intelligible instructions at all. Ask for an explanation.