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?

Finding what you want in a hurry is a large part of conducting a hearing in an orderly way. Having to keep pausing in the middle of your cross-examination or submissions to hunt for a document wastes time time and interrupts your train of thought at best – and if you can’t find what you’re after, may deprive you of good points you could otherwise have made.

A lot of the answer is just to know the bundle well. But you can also develop certain habits that will help you navigate smoothly. What the habits are will depend on your own way of thinking and doing things. You may find colours helpful – for instance flagging certain sorts of documents in particular colours, highlighting one corner of respondents’ witness statements in one colour, claimants’ in another, using coloured paper for a particular document (e.g. your chronology) that you may want to refer to a lot. Or it may be about where you put things: if you always tuck your list of issues inside the front flap of your bundle, then you will always know where to look for it. If you always write a list of the witnesses and key players on the first page of your notebook, you will know where to find that too. If you’re lucky enough to be able to commit key page numbers to memory without breaking sweat, do that. If your bundle runs to several volumes, make sure there is a clear label on the inside cover of each volume as well as on the spine – that way if you have 2 or 3 volumes open, you will still be able to tell at a glance which is which.

These are all just examples. The real point is to notice what’s tripping you up, and then apply a bit of thought to how you can prevent it.

Quite a lot of material presented to tribunals is illegible.

There are good reasons for this. Many documents produced out in the real world are written under significant time pressure and in less than ideal circumstances. Notes written during, say, a disciplinary hearing are unlikely to be written in a clear round hand. Particularly if the meeting was tense.

On the other hand, a surprising number of ET1 and ET3’s require a magnifying glass and some time to decode.

If you have bad handwriting it is worth typing as much as possible. If this is not possible, you must just take as long as it takes to produce a legible document.

When dealing with existing documents that are particularly hard to read, the sensible approach is to produce a typed version. In most cases you should be able to agree its accuracy with the Respondent. Even if you can’t, it is worth doing. The tribunal can always check the accuracy against the original if there is a problem.

Black. Or blue. Or dark purple, if you like.

The only really important thing to avoid is using a light pastel colour, which will not photocopy properly. Light pink, I have recently found, is completely unsuitable

If your hearing bundle runs to more than one volume, divide the volumes at round numbers if you sensibly can – so, for example, don’t put pages 1-437 in volume 1 and pages 437-623 in vol. 2. Put pages 1-400 in vol. 1, and 401-623 in vol. 2. The more volumes you have, the more this will help everyone find their way around.

But don’t stick to round numbers at the price of daft divisions, obviously. If there’s a two-page dismissal letter starting on page 400, you’ll want to find the second page next to it – not at the beginning of vol. 2 of the bundle.

Even if it seems like a good idea to arrange the papers in the bundle in some order other than strict chronological order, it isn’t. Really and truly.

One particular situation in which people compiling bundles tend to be tempted to use a non-chronological order is in discrimination cases where actual comparators are involved. Sometimes you see a bundle separated into ‘claimant documents’ and ‘comparator documents.’

But the point of a comparator is to compare. So – for example – if you are saying you applied for a promotion, and someone less well-qualified than you was appointed, the bundle will contain in your application and his. The tribunal is going to want to look at the two applications and compare them. That will be inconvenient if there are two or three hundred pages between them: either the tribunal (and everyone else) will keep having to turn backwards and forward through a fat wodge of paper – or else they will have to pull one of the applications out of the bundle so as to be able to look at it side-by side with the other.

If the documents are in strict chronological order, the two applications are likely to be next to each other in the bundle, or very close – so flipping from one to the other and back again for the purposes of comparisons will be easy.

This is a particular instance of the general observation that tribunals generally prefer to hear stories in chronological order – so that is the order in which, by and large, they will expect witnesses cross-examined. So in general (there will be exceptions of course), if you need to cross-examine a witness on a number of different documents, you will start by asking them to open the bundle near the front, and then you will work through it towards the back.

Strictly speaking, if you are the claimant, it’s your case – so it’s your job to prepare the bundles for the hearing and provide copies for the other side and the tribunal. You’ll need 6 copies: 1 for you, 1 for your opponent, 3 for the tribunal, and 1 for the witness table.

In fact, bundles for the employment tribunals are probably more often prepared by the employer’s representatives. The reason for this is that in many cases, only the employer is represented by solicitors. Solicitors have fancy photocopiers and heavyweight hole-punches and people who are practised at preparing bundles, so it tends to be assumed that they should do it because it will be easier for them.

The main advantage in doing the bundles yourself is that it gives you control over when the job gets done – there’s no risk that you will only get your copy the day before the hearing and have a very short time to get to know it, mark it with highlighters, stick post-its on the most important pages etc. But if you trust the solicitors on the other side to do a competent job in reasonably good time, and they are willing to do it, you might as well let them.

Answer: It only has one side.

Hearing bundles, and for that matter, all tribunal documents, are normally printed single-sided.

There is an argument to be had over whether this is a good thing. Single-sided printing means that the blank side can be used for notes, and it is easier to ‘flag’ the bundle with post-its. On the other hand, it does produce bulky files of paper that are hard to manoeuvre. Then there is the environmental damage.

Regardless of your position in that debate, it is best to fall in with the general practice and give the tribunal what it is used to.

Tribunals occasionally direct that the hearing bundle is to be limited to a fixed number of pages.

This is on the whole a good idea. Most bundles contain a lot of documents that don’t need to be there and won’t be referred to during the hearing: see Sedley’s laws of documents. The parties put them in ‘for completeness,’ or because putting them in ‘just in case’ saves making a decision about whether or not they will be needed.

If the tribunal directs that the bundle is to be limited to, say, 300 or 500 pages, the two sides will actually have to think about what they want the tribunal to see. Does the whole of the Employee Handbook really need to go in? Is there any dispute about whether the grievance procedure was properly followed – if not, what’s the grievance procedure doing in the bundle? Does that long email string about when the disciplinary hearing is to take place actually matter?

In the end, a document only needs to be in the bundle if the tribunal needs to read it in order to understand the story properly, or if one side or the other wants to use it in cross-examination. If it doesn’t tick either of those boxes, it’s a waste of paper.

One of the difficult things about running a tribunal case for the first time is the uncertainty about what needs to be done before the hearing. The first step – putting in your ET1 – is fairly obvious, but after that it is easy to get overwhelmed.

If the tribunal has made detailed case management orders, this makes things simpler. If you follow them, you should do most of what you need.

Otherwise, it is worth remembering that there are three main things you need to sort out before you reach the tribunal. This is a gross simplification, but it is worth bearing in mind if you are uncertain what to do next.

Documents

When the hearing starts you want to have an agreed bundle of documents, containing all the relevant evidence.

Normally, this means you need to do two things: discovering and bundling.

Discovery is the process of figuring out what documents you have; then asking the respondent for documents they have, and getting a tribunal order if necessary.

Bundling is the process of drawing up an index of the relevant documents (not the same thing as all the documents), putting them in chronological order and paginating them. Paginate is a fancy lawyer’s term for writing page numbers on them. Then you have to agree the bundle with the respondent.

Witness Statements

All of the people who are going to give evidence should have prepared a witness statement and these should be exchanged with the respondent.

Know what you are going to say

Basically, you need to be ready to do two things: cross-examine witnesses and make submissions.

What this will involve will vary from case to case. An experienced advocate, dealing with a simple case, might just jot a few points on a sheet of paper. On the other hand, in a complicated case, or if it will be your first time in a tribunal, you will want to do a lot more.

A good starting point is a list of issues the tribunal will need to decide. Once you have that, you can expand it into a list of things you want to ask each witness about and another list of areas you need to address in submissions.

Detailed lists of questions get a bad press in legal circles. The potential disadvantage is that they may turn you into a robot – asking one question after another in a monotone, paying no attention to what the witness says. But this can be avoided with a little care and attention.

The advantage of detailed lists of questions is that they make sure you do not miss anything and allow you to plan, in detail, the order and approach of your questions. For beginners, this is particularly valuable.

You should also consider written submissions. In complicated cases, these are almost vital. In a simple case, the tribunal will get much less advantage from them. But this does not mean they are not useful. By writing down, in full, what you want to say, you will make sure you have the issues, the evidence and your arguments thoroughly worked out.

Unfortunately, you will normally not be able to complete your written submissions before the hearing starts. This is because you will not know what evidence is going to come out during the hearing. The best approach is to leave gaps in your submissions, where this evidence can be slotted in later.