How Hiring an Employment Law Expert Can Save Your Company Money

Taking part in an industrial or employment tribunal can present one with an excellent means of pitching one's wits against the great and the good of the legal fraternity.

The legal performance and parlance is notably less high-falutin than at a criminal court and very often the spoils go not to the party that is in the right so much as to the one which can demonstrate that the other has failed to properly follow correct practice in the conduct of an industrial dispute between the employer and employee.

For the employer in particular the process can transpire to be a veritable minefield. The employer is expected to be familiar with the procedures in all details, whereas employees are often able to plead ignorance with a degree of success. Whilst it would be rather an overstatement to suggest that the process is loaded in favour of the complainant, there certainly are liberties that are there to be taken by the employee from which the employer is effectively excluded.

This writer has some degree of experience of employment tribunals and of the ways in which they function. Despite having no legal qualifications or even any training I have successfully supported several complainants in their disputes with their former employers.

Two cases in particular spring immediately to mind as an illustration of how an employer can come to grief through not following the established practices.

The first claimant was a Scottish chap, a Dundonian with a very distinct local dialect. He had been summarily dismissed from his employment as an airport luggage porter after a customer had formally complained that he had sworn at her. The customer, who was a native of Brazil, was of course not able to attend the hearing, but instead sent a letter to the tribunal in the employer's support.

It was abundantly clear from the letter that English wasn't her first language. In point of fact her mother tongue was Portuguese. I produced witnesses, including a work colleague of the complainant who was born in Glasgow who confirmed that even he sometimes had some difficulty in understanding his accent. I then put the complainant onto the stand and after only a few minutes the point had been made quite emphatically. The potential for the man from Dundee to have been misheard or otherwise misunderstood by the Portuguese-speaking lady was not inconsiderable. The company ought to have given him the benefit of the very substantial doubt and the complaint was upheld.

In another case a warehouseman had been sacked for gross misconduct after hurling a spanner at the head of a colleague. He quite openly admitted to the transgression but hadn't been given any opportunity to consider the charge against him, or else to present his case prior to his dismissal. The employer had believed it to have been an open and shut case and thus hadn't felt the need to hear what he had to say. This admission cost the company something in the region of five thousand pounds as the employment tribunals upheld his claim for unfair dismissal, awarding just a thirty percent contributory fault against the warehouseman for the act of throwing the spanner.

Whilst it is no doubt true that some employers are cavalier about the rights of their employees, there are many more who are simply untrained in the finer points of employment law and who make genuine mistakes whilst having every desire to act in good faith. Mistakes which, if seized upon, can cost them not only financially but in terms of valuable time spent and also reputation.

It can be useful for a small to medium enterprise to take on the services of an expert in the field of human resources, HR outsourcing, redundancy and employment law. Help of this kind has the advantage of being available at the time when it is needed without requiring a permanent presence within the organisation or on its payroll.

Mark Richards is a professional writer working for The Middle Man, a business promotion service using its experience and expert knowledge of marketing strategy to generate important new business for its clients at a surprisingly low cost.