by Naomi Cunningham & Michael Reed
One of the types of order that the tribunal can make is an ‘unless order’. This is an order in the form: “Unless you do that, this will happen”.
For example, the tribunal may order “Unless the Claimant discloses all the document on which he intends to rely by the 1st May, his claim will be struck out”.
Unless orders are usually made when a party has failed to comply with previous orders. They are a way of the tribunal saying “This is your last chance. Sort this out, or else.”
I’m running the London Marathon on Sunday. Partly for fun, but I’m also raising money for the Free Representation Unit.
FRU is charity that provides representation to people who can’t afford to pay lawyers. In the last year we’ve helped 700 people, about 300 in employment tribunals. I work there as Legal Officer.
If you’d like to help, donations can be made through Just Giving. Any contribution you would like to give would be very welcome and will be put to good use.
Written submissions are a useful advocacy tool, but it is not always clear when they should be used.
This is an area where personal style and preference matter quite a lot. Both authors use written submissions a lot. Other advocates use them less. But, bearing that in mind, here are some guidelines:
In general, arguments don’t gain anything by being repeated. This is particularly true in inter-parties correspondence.
This does not prevent people writing essentially the same letter more than once. This can, and does, reach ridiculous proportions.
2004 was a good year for bad ideas in the employment litigation field. One of the minor bits of foolishness was to limit the involvement…
We’ve added a Resources page to the site that gives information about other useful information.
here are two sources of law in the employment tribunals. One is legislation: the law passed by Parliament. The other is case-law, some of which consists in the courts’ interpretations and explanations of legislation, and some of which is what is called ‘common law’ – law that doesn’t come from legislation at all, but has been developed over the years by the courts.
These are broad headings. They do not take into account the differences between Acts of Parliament and Regulations. Or deal with the significant role European legislation and case-law has on tribunals.
The point is that there is a lot of useful information out there that is not the law.
Many appeal cases are not finally resolved by Employment Appeal Tribunal. So when running an appeal case, you need to consider the possibility of it returning to the tribunal. Lawyers often describe this as a case being remitted.
A lot of legislation is in the form “Something will be true, in the following circumstances”. For example, Section 1 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 begins “…a person discriminates against a woman if-“, then goes on to describe the situations that will be Direct Sex Discrimination.
Statutes, and the law they create, are often complex and these provisions can be difficult to understand. A common mistake is confusing circumstances linked by ‘and’ with those linked by ‘or’, and vice versa.
You will often see people in tribunals responding to what a witness or litigant is saying.
They may raise their eyebrows; roll their eyes; suck their teeth; make the sound ‘tsk’; sigh deeply, grimace horribly or some combination of these and other things.