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.

Sedley being The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sedley of the Court of Appeal.

Interestingly, Google tracked them down on the website of the New South Wales Supreme Court. It is comforting to find that some things are universal.

First Law: Documents may be assembled in any order, provided it is not chronological, numerical or alphabetical.

Second Law: Documents shall in no circumstances be paginated continuously.

Third Law: No two copies of any bundle shall have the same pagination.

Fourth Law: Every document shall carry at least three numbers in different places.

Fifth Law: Any important documents shall be omitted.

Sixth Law: At least 10 percent of the documents shall appear more than once in the bundle.

Seventh Law: As many photocopies as practicable shall be illegible, truncated or cropped.

Eighth Law:

1. At least 80 percent of the documents shall be irrelevant.
2. Counsel shall refer in court to no more than 10 percent of the documents, but these may include as many irrelevant ones as counsel or solicitor deems appropriate.

Ninth Law: Only one side of any double-sided document shall be reproduced.

Tenth Law: Transcriptions of manuscript documents shall bear as little relation as reasonably practicable to the original.

Eleventh Law: Documents shall be held together, in the absolute discretion of the solicitor assembling them, by:

1. a steel pin sharp enough to injure the reader,
2. a staple too short to penetrate the full thickness of the bundle.
3. tape binding so stitched that the bundle cannot be fully opened, or,
4. a ring or arch-binder, so damaged that the two arcs do not meet.

Putting page numbers in a bundle is a dull job – and guess what? Nobody has to do it.

Surprisingly few of those who put bundles together seem to know that modern photocopiers will add page numbers automatically. Instead, they scrawl semi-legible numbers in by hand; or, worse, they use a mechanical paginating contraption. This is a menace: it is horrible to use, because it gets ink all over your fingers, and is liable to arbitrary jams and repeats – so although it is a very dull task, you have to stay wide awake and attentive while you’re doing it, or it will go horribly wrong. And it is almost certainly running out of ink, so you have to bring it down on the page with savage force or it won’t print at all.

Reading the photocopier manual is dull, but at least you’ll only have to do it once – and ever after your bundles will be beautifully and legibly paginated. Anyway until the machine stops.

Chronological order – that is to say, date order – is the only way to arrange the papers in a hearing bundle. Anything else will be confusing at best, enraging at worst.

Admittedly part of the reason why this is the best way to arrange the papers is that it is the most common way. That’s not an argument that always works: the most common way to sing is out of tune, after all, and the most common way to paint a sash window is so that the top half is jammed permanently shut. But when it comes to bundles (like deciding on which side of the road to drive), tedious conformity to usual practice is by far the best thing. The parties’ representatives will have to navigate the bundle at speed in the course of the hearing, and it is much easier to navigate at speed if you know your way around.

The one exception to strict chronological order is the formal tribunal documents – the ET1, ET3, together with any questionnaires and responses, requests for additional information and responses to such requests. It is conventional to put these in a separate section right at the front of the bundle. Some people also put any grievances that are required to found the claim in this section, too, and that’s not a bad idea.

But after that, resist any temptation to subdivide by theme (‘investigation,’ ‘disciplinary proceedings,’ ‘grievance about photocopier incident,’ ‘disciplinary appeal’ etc). Just arrange all the documents in the order in which they were written.

Witness statement should not be put in the bundle of documents.

There is a theoretical justification for this, but the main reason is convenience.¹

Witnesses will often be referred to documents in the bundle and when making submissions about witness evidence you will often move from the statement to the documents it talks about.

If the documents and statements are in the same bundle this involves a lot of flipping back and forth. Much easier to be able to keep the statement open in front of you while thumbing through the documents.

1. The theoretical justification is that witness statements are a form of examination in chief, not documentary evidence.

There may be good uses for four-ring ring-binders, but hearing bundles in four-ring binders are a pain. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the two extra holes – it’s just that it so happens that there are far more 2-hole hole punches knocking around employment tribunals and lawyers’ offices than 4-hole hole punches. If you have a 4-hole bundle to which extra pages need to be added during the hearing, either they have to be forced onto the rings so that they don’t fit properly and won’t turn smoothly, or else someone has to scrabble around hunting for the elusive 4-hole hole punch.

So just use a standard 2-hole binder like everyone else, ok?

It is becoming more and more common for parties and representatives in the employment tribunals to use laptops in the course of the hearing, and most employment judges will now permit you to do this without any show of surprise.

In a short hearing you may do better with an old-fashioned notebook, but in a case running over several days or more, notes of the evidence taken on a laptop (if your or your note-taker’s typing speed is up to it) can be very helpful. There are two main benefits: legibility and searchability. Trying to make sense of someone else’s handwritten notes of evidence is tiring at the best of times – and late at night between days n and n+1 of a hearing is not the best of times. Having completely legible typed notes that you can search for a particular word in an instant (ctrl+F is a much under-used keyboard shortcut) is extremely time-saving and convenient. If you are taking the notes yourself, you can highlight or bookmark key sections as you go along; and you can paste extracts from your notes of evidence into your written submissions.

If you have a voluminous hearing bundle, save an electronic copy of the index on your laptop if you can: then, if you are hunting for a document in the bundle under pressure of time, you may be able to find it faster by searching for a keyword or a date in the index.

You will of course be much better equipped to take advantage of these benefits if you can touch-type fluently.