Brevity extremity - Fairbank v Care Management Group; Evans v Svenska Handelsbanken AB Two cases involving very long ET1s (Tribunal Claim Forms) prepared by the same firm of solicitors.
How long is very long? In this case, around 27 pages. The employment judge considered this to be too long and ordered that the ET1s be condensed to a single page each. The solicitors objected but the Regional Employment Judge responded by explaining the requirements of 'Details of claim' in the Rules. "The Tribunal has to manage thousands of cases a year and most claimants are able to provide a description of the events relevant to their claim, no more complex than [these], confining themselves to one or two sides of A4," the Judge said.
The claimants appealed and won. It is for the claimant to decide how to present their claim, said the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It held that the tribunal's decision to limit the content of an ET1 was an error of law/perverse. The proper course of action was to narrow issues during a case management hearing and by striking out any irrelevant material at that stage.
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