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What if anything can you do about the employer who refuses as a matter of ‘policy’ to give references at all?
If the claimant and respondent in an employment tribunal case are going to negotiate, the time they are most likely to do it is in the last few days before the hearing. Negotiations can disrupt preparation, with potentially disastrous results if they hit a snag at a late stage.
It is common in litigation for both sides to stop listening to each other.
This is only natural. Litigation is civilised argument. And we all, when arguing, want to get our points in rather than listen to the other person.
Like many natural instincts, however, this is best suppressed during litigation.
Witness statement should not be put in the bundle of documents.
There is a theoretical justification for this, but the main reason is convenience.
It is very common, in correspondence or orally, to need to refer to other documents, be they statutes, case-law or evidence. You will very rarely write anything that does not talk about other documents.
It is well worth thinking about how you do this. Writing something like “Such and such was laid out in the company’s policy” can cause problems. Often the policy will be long, and there may even be more than one. Your reader will have to search through pages of documents to find what you are talking about. Even a short submission of a couple of pages, will probably refer to a dozen or so other documents at least, so these problems add up quickly.
From time to time it is useful to send documents by recorded or special delivery.
There are normally two reasons to do this: dodgy opponents and important or urgent deliveries.
Sometimes it is important to find out whether there are any differences – and if so what – between two very similar documents. A useful quick way of doing that is to read down the last word on each line for each page or paragraph of the two documents you are comparing.
Tribunals will often ask you whether you agree with a particular formulation of a point, as a way of checking they understand the issue.
For example, a Judge may ask:
Mr Reed, as I understand this you accept that there was no breach of the statutory dismissal procedures, but say that the hearing was procedurally unfair. Is that right?
This is often a good thing.
In the course of employment litigation you will often have to turn gross salary figures into net.
One way of doing this is to sit down with the tax legislation and work things out. This is boring, time-consuming and difficult.
A much easier solution is to use one of the ready reckoners available online. A good one is
listentotaxman.com.