u/RecordingPositive379

I'm a litigant in person in an Employment Tribunal claim (whistleblowing detriment + automatic unfair dismissal). I have a Preliminary Hearing coming up where I'll be applying to amend the List of Issues to add several new issues/sub-issues.

My approach has been to rely on two cases together:

• Selkent Bus Co Ltd v Moore [1996] ICR 836 — the standard test (arguability, prejudice to either side, overall balance of justice).
• Abercrombie v Aga Rangemaster [2013] EWCA Civ 1148 — to argue that the focus shouldn't be on whether an amendment is formally a "new cause of action," but on the practical extent of new factual/legal enquiry it requires, and specifically whether the other side already had the underlying facts or a fair opportunity to investigate them.

Most of the amendments I'm seeking are based on documents the Respondent itself produced (through disclosure), or on its own pleaded case, rather than on anything new to them. My argument is that under Abercrombie, there's no real prejudice because they already had the material — even though the amendments introduce new legal characterisations.

A few questions for anyone with ET or civil litigation experience:

1. Is combining Selkent and Abercrombie like this actually sound, or is Abercrombie more of an EAT/appellate gloss that doesn't do much extra work at first-instance Tribunal level?
2. Are there other cases commonly cited alongside Selkent for "the respondent already had the facts, so no real prejudice" arguments that I should also have ready?
3. In practice, do Employment Judges find this kind of "no new enquiry" argument persuasive, or does lateness/volume of amendments tend to dominate regardless of whose documents they came from?
4. Any common pitfalls with relying on Abercrombie specifically that I should be aware of before a judge tests it?

Thank you

For a one day PH for case management how long should a Skeleton with a few applications be? Can the skeleton include screenshots of evidence to backup the arguement incase the respondent does not include all the evidence in the PH Bundle? Thank you

Long story short — I was dismissed from a job and I'm now in Employment Tribunal proceedings. During the process I received a bunch of documents from my former employer through a Subject Access Request — things like performance notes, meeting scripts, and an objectives assessment — but they were all produced as merged PDFs rather than in their original file formats.

The problem is that some of these documents look like they might have been written after the fact to justify the dismissal rather than at the time they claim to be from. The performance documents do not have any dates, I think they have been fabricated and only metadata can answer this — what I really need is the metadata from the original Word and Excel files. Things like when they were actually created, who created them, whether they were modified after the date shown, that kind of thing.

I've since received other documents from the same employer in native format through a second SAR and the difference is night and day — you can see exactly who edited what and when. It's made me even more curious about what the metadata on the original documents would show.

My questions are:

Has anyone managed to get metadata from employment documents through a SAR or tribunal disclosure process? Did the employer just hand it over or did you have to fight for it?

Is there anything specific I should be asking for — like particular file properties or system logs — that would show when a document was actually created versus when it was last modified?

Has anyone had experience of a tribunal drawing an adverse inference from an employer refusing to produce documents in native format?

Any advice from people who've been through something similar would be really appreciated. Litigant in person so figuring a lot of this out as I go.

I had a 2 hour PH last year. We discussed pleadings for large parts of the PH.

I submitted a long list of issues and the Respondent also submitted a very brief list of issues.

The judge at the very end made some small changes to Respondent list of issues

After the PH in the same day Respondent solicitors sent the list of issues to the judge copying me in.

I was not engaged in loi nor did i agree.

But the respondent loi got adopted in the CMO.

It then resulted in a handful of pages in disclosure from the respondent.

Can someone tell me how to get the list of issues changed?

I have another ph coming up and ive submitted a Rule 29 application to ask for the list of issues to be changed and included my version of what i think the list of issues should look like.

Can anyone recommend a direct access barrister for Whistleblowing employment case please?