From time to time you will see the term “sic” used in a quotation. For example: Bob Sampson made a decision that no reasonable men…
The Court of Appeal has commented on the proper use of skeleton arguments in Tombstone Ltd v Raja & Heals. Although the case had nothing…
From time to time you will want to emphasise text in a document you are writing. The most common use is drawing attention to a…
If you have been knocking around the wonderful world of employment tribunals for a little while, you will have accumulated a few completed cases. It…
It is not unusual, when writing, to struggle with how to phrase a particular thought or issue. This is particularly common when the subject is…
Litigants and new lawyers are often troubled by the vast number of different situations that arise in the process of litigation.
It is helpful to remember that, really, there are only a handful of different situations, just an infinite number of slight variations.
One of the most common is asking the tribunal to do or order something. This might be ordering a document be disclosed; a question answered; a hearing postponed or a witness ordered to attend. But all these situations follow a common pattern. What follows is a standard template for applying for almost anything.
It is very common, in correspondence or orally, to need to refer to other documents, be they statutes, case-law or evidence. You will very rarely write anything that does not talk about other documents.
It is well worth thinking about how you do this. Writing something like “Such and such was laid out in the company’s policy” can cause problems. Often the policy will be long, and there may even be more than one. Your reader will have to search through pages of documents to find what you are talking about. Even a short submission of a couple of pages, will probably refer to a dozen or so other documents at least, so these problems add up quickly.
If you want to say in a witness statement that someone said something, just say that they said it.
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.
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.