Don’t ask for reinstatement or re-engagement unless you really want it.
If you want the other side to do something (e.g. disclose some documents to you), always see if they will do it voluntarily before you apply for a tribunal order requiring them to do it.
Mothers of young children will often suffer the greatest losses when they are dismissed. If you have lost a responsible and demanding job soon after having your first child, you may have real difficulty getting or keeping another job at the same level.
It is rare that there is any practical need to write a letter to the tribunal or the other side longer than a page and a half. If you have written long letter, the chances are that much of it is just ‘noise’ that will obscure your real message and make it less likely that you get what you want.
If you are representing yourself, and one of the other claimants is represented by lawyers, don’t let the lawyers hog the claimants’ table.
If you are representing yourself in the employment tribunal, re-examination is problematic. How do you re-examine yourself?
If you have a lot of heavy papers to get on and off trains and up and down steps on your way to the tribunal, wear a skirt: you are much more likely to be offered help than if you’re wearing trousers.
Your case is ‘adjourned part-heard’ if the tribunal doesn’t have time to finish hearing it in the time originally allotted. If this happens to you, one thing you can do to make your task at that point less daunting is to write yourself some re-reading notes while the case is still fresh in your mind.
This is advice often give to aspiring novelists. The idea is that your story will be more vivid if you let the characters of the people you are writing about emerge from their actions than if you just describe what they are like. When you write your witness statement, you are telling a story. Unlike a novel, your statement must be true. But ‘show, don’t tell’ is still good advice.
Sometimes another party in a case will make an application about something in which you have no stake or interest.
This is most common in cases with many different parties. Often a disclosure debate between the first claimant and the second respondent will be irrelevant to the third claimant.
In this situation it is sensible, if you are copied into the correspondence, to let everyone know you have no comment to make.