Witnesses and page numbers
Witnesses in the employment tribunal are usually asked to read their statements aloud. Often the statement will refer to documents, for example:
After that, I did not feel I could work for the company any longer, so I wrote my letter of resignation dated 16 September 2008 [235].
One of the small things you can do to help the hearing run smoothly is to let your witnesses know in advance how you’re going to handle references to documents. Do you want them to read out the page numbers? Do you want them to pause so that you can ask the tribunal to read the document? Do you want them just to plough on, and only pause if you interrupt and ask them to?
There’s no single right way of doing this. Sometimes by the time your witness gives her evidence, the tribunal will already have seen all the documents she refers to – so she can just read her statement, ignoring the page references. Sometimes you will want to get her to pause at each reference to allow the tribunal to read the document referred to. Sometimes you will want to pick some documents for the tribunal to read, but pass over others. Of course, you do need to have made a decision about this in advance; and if your decision is to pause only for the documents the tribunal has not yet seen , then you need to know which these are and have them marked on your copy of your witness’s statement.
The main thing is to let the witness know before she starts giving her evidence how you plan to handle this: otherwise she may be left hesitating at page references, looking at you anxiously and wondering if you’ve decided the tribunal doesn’t need to read this document, or just forgotten to ask her to pause. It won’t matter hugely, but it is the kind of thing that can annoy the tribunal and/or make a witness feel a bit unsettled – both of which are best avoided.
