Be prepared – bring your papers

When you turn up to a tribunal hearing you should bring with you all the relevant papers.

This sounds obvious, but in practice it is easy to make mistakes. Here are two examples:

CMDs and PHRs

These are still hearings and you will still need papers.

You will not necessarily need everything. In particular, much of the evidence can be left at home for a CMD (particularly if it runs to more than one lever-arch file). And in a PHR you will only need the evidence relating to the issues that will be dealt with at the hearing.

But err on the side of caution. It is normally better to drag an extra file to the tribunal than be without it if the vital document is inside.

Correspondence file and attendance notes

By the time you reach the hearing, you should normally have a medium to large file of letters between you, the tribunal, the other side and anyone else relevant to the case. It should also contain notes of conversations you’ve had, in person or by phone.

Bring this file along. It is the only way of dealing with issues of who said what to whom when. This sort of thing comes up often in tribunals. For example, you may need to know when a document was sent to the respondent. If you have your file you can easily find out and give a precise answer – with some evidence to back it up. Otherwise you are left saying something like “I think it was sent sometime in March”, which is much less convincing.