The case of Byczko v Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust in the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) demonstrates to claimant employees the perils of an overly long narrative in the claim form.
Ms Byczko was a nurse. She resigned and brought claims for constructive unfair dismissal, disability discrimination and whistleblowing. She set out the basis of her claim in a long, dense narrative. A judge drafted a List of Issues for her and ordered her to correct it so that the tribunal could understand the claims it needed to consider. A list of issues is a bit like a shopping list: what are the issues you want the tribunal to decide? The list will be agreed between the parties before the trial and will give the parties and the tribunal a road map for the hearing.
Ms Byczko ignored the draft list and instead produced a 37 page document that listed further whistleblowing claims. Her original disclosures were between 4 and 6 items. This increased to 32. Rather than refining and clarifying the issues the case was no clearer. She had ignored the order of the tribunal to work on and produce the list of issues.
The tribunal struck out her claims. This is quite unusual in all but the rarest of cases but one can see how it might become more common in the age of AI where documents are getting s longer for no good reason.
The decision to strike out was based on the tribunal’s assessment that a fair trial was no longer possible.
The claimant appealed to the EAT. The EAT agreed with the tribunal and upheld the strike out. Whilst tribunals must help unrepresented and disabled claimants to clarify their claims but they must remain impartial. It is not their job to build a party’s case for them.
The tribunal had made adjustments for Ms Byzczko and offered her an intermediary. She declined. She was warned of the risk that her claim might be struck out. She was asked to work on the draft list of issues and ignored the tribunal’s order in relation to this. The tribunal will only go so far. Without a clear list of issues the hospital trust did not know the case it had to meet and this had to also be a consideration.
We are seeing more and more long documents which have clearly been drafted by AI. Less is more when it comes to tribunal pleadings. When you send in an overly long claim you risk alienating the tribunal that has to wade through it to pick out the issues it has to determine and you risk losing some of the issues in the noise. We encourage our clients to keep pleadings brief and clear which assists the parties and tribunals and gets you off on a better foot with the judge. If you use AI then at least ask the LLM to make its output brief. It’s important to ensure the basis of your claim is clear “I am claiming disability discrimination (failure to make reasonable adjustments,” for example, but you don’t have to go into every minute detail. That’s for witness evidence.
