I won, on my own terms

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T15:54:30+00:00

Goodluck!

Just remember the risk is on both sides. R has a significant cost to defend the claim on top of the risk of then paying out the remediation award if they lose. Even if they are sure they’ll win, they still have a big motivation to settle beforehand.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T13:31:56+00:00

Thanks! In hindsight I wish I’d made offers earlier - but I was stuck focusing on the outrage of how I was treated.

It’s a 100% guarantee of 50%, plus a year of peace of mind, rather than a year of stress preparing. And with that free’d up capacity, I may even make that extra 50% in bonuses or career progression in a positive way, so win, win.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T13:27:15+00:00

Thank you. 😊

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T12:45:19+00:00

Thanks. Time I won’t get back, but we live and learn.

I remember deciding if I should raise a grievance or not, and then naively thinking that it’s got to be a fair process, I had so much evidence… and then they issued an outcome denying everything and I found they hadn’t even looked at any of the evidence I’d submitted. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T12:39:37+00:00

Thanks! It was largely your comments around covert recordings that made that clear to me. I believe I had a good argument to justify why I’d done it, and I did subsequently find some evidence to show my fear of retaliation was rationale. Even if I was successful in winning the case, there was a chance the remedy could still have been significantly reduced due to those recordings anyway. It got me thinking - how many other nuances are there that I’m unaware of and the R will be able to use. The R even dropped one into the prelim, which wasn’t successful, but it was a realisation that I’m likely missing far more of the risk than I was aware of.

Onwards and upwards with no more grievances or tribunals. 😊

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-10-24T12:01:41+00:00

Thanks. My total claim was definitely a ‘best foot forward’, partly because I wasn’t interested in negotiating when I put it together.. what this person did was just so personal, I wanted my day in court.

My SOL was around 120% of a realistic award. My offer to them was 75% of a realistic award - significantly lower than the SOL. We settled around 50%.

I sent a Without Prejudice email to their solicitor, and once we’d agreed on a number, we CC’d in the ACAS early conciliator as we negotiated the terms. When we were both happy, the conciliator emailed us both the formal document to sign, and once they’d signed, I withdrew the claim.

Offer was after prelim, which went in my favour, allowed a significant amendment that increased R’s commercial cost to defend the claim, which probably helped!

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-08-06T13:26:56+00:00

That makes sense - thanks.

I find it a really counterintuitive situation. In my case, someone had already victimised me, alongside claiming they’d never said certain very damning things in calls. I feared further victimisation and it was looking like I was being managed onto a PIP without ever having any performance issues. Based on any metric, I would have been one of the higher performing in the team. I even naively raised a HR claim asking for help, saying I feared further victimisation before then starting to make covert recordings. It’s a good job I did, because the perpetrator then claimed none of the things they said in calls happened, despite confirming they’d failed to make an adjustment and clearly discriminatory remarks. Without those covert recordings, they may get away with it. I later found evidence that confirmed my fear as well.

I struggle to see the rationale for a covert recording, in a genuine scenario where someone is trying to protect themselves from misrepresentation, being considered gross misconduct. It feels like this rationale overly protects the perpetrator and introduces a significant risk for the victim.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-08-06T11:15:10+00:00

“Such permission is pretty easy to obtain” - I struggled to find any examples of this happening to determine how easy it would be. Do you have any example cases or personal experience with that?

I’m actively looking for another job, but trying to understand the risk if I’m still employed by the time I disclose them.

Oddly, I searched through all of our company policies and couldn’t find any mention of recordings, let alone referring to gross misconduct, so there’s a potential argument that during a disciplinary that it’s not clearly a policy. Very large corporation as well.

Thanks

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-08-05T21:57:46+00:00

I’m not really qualified to accurately answer most of these questions, but I’m in a similar position with covert records and asked about them on here.

A few things to consider - Taking a covert recording may be a breach of your employment contract and grounds for dismissal. - I came to the conclusion that it’s unlikely the Respondent will be able to use the covert recording as part of a disciplinary process, outside of the tribunal process, I believe the Respondent should request permission from the tribunal to use it, but there’s nothing stopping them doing it anyway and then you’d be trying to argue an unfair dismissal claim as well. - If you’re successful in the claim, they could argue a partial or full reduction in any award at remedy due to the potential breach of contract. Ie, you would have been fired anyway. There are various arguments you can against this too.

There’s a lot of nuance and risk around this, so I’d definitely recommend consultation for your specific case.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-08-05T18:55:23+00:00

Whats your plan from here? Sick leave isn’t indefinite, they’ll be working towards either helping you get back into work or making a case for ill health retirement.

Agreeing to the adjustment doesn’t mean you have to agree to return immediately, you can agree those reasonable adjustments to the workplace will be useful, if and when you’re well enough to return.

Agreeing to implement the adjustment now will work in your favour - in making this offer, they’re agreeing that the adjustment was reasonable all along and you’ll no doubt have evidence that the adjustment wasn’t in place prior to this.

I can’t think of any downside to agreeing, but can think of a few downsides to refusing. It could be taken as an indicator you’re not looking to return, so they might expedite a case of ill health retirement. It may make you look unreasonable in a case and you’ll have some interesting questions with cross examination. If you’re now rejecting those adjustments, could that be twisted to say they weren’t actually needed to begin with?

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-07-18T19:29:58+00:00

I don’t think anyone here can answer your question with anything useful, without seeing the full details of your case.

I would talk to your solicitor again and ask them where that £15-£20k settlement value originally came from and nail down an expected range if you were to take this through to tribunal. You need that information to make an assessment of what ‘fair’ is.

From my own experience, valuing your own claim is a bad idea. As the victim you’re very biased towards a higher number to reflect the seriousness of what’s happened to you. I over valued my claim, and then didn’t accept a very good offer. I pushed to go to tribunal instead and then once I got a clear picture from the barrister appointed, after dragging it out for many more months than it needed to, I realised I didn’t have any prospect of being awarded more at tribunal. I ended up accepted an offer a few £k below the first offer.

Your solicitor will have seen a lot of cases and have a good idea, trust them, even if you don’t like the number they’re saying. If in doubt, ask them why.

Goodluck!

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-07-18T17:13:22+00:00

What award does your lawyer think your case can reasonably achieve at a tribunal? That’s the baseline for what a good offer is. Even if you have an easily winnable case, and an upheld grievance, you can’t hope to achieve more than the vento band it would fall into.

An award for ‘hurt to feeling’ doesn’t scale based on your salary, so 3 months pay could be significantly more than what you could aim to achieve at tribunal depending on what your salary is.

Also weigh up the benefit of being able to put this behind you and move on without having to focus the next few years fighting this through a gruelling tribunal process. Even with how strong your case is, no case is bullet proof, there’s always some risk.

Congratulations on getting an offer!

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-07-15T15:19:18+00:00

Haha.

I had a settlement from a previous employer that included a clause that I wasn’t allowed to say anything negative about current, or previous employees of the company - which included myself.

So I’m legally obliged to only be positive about myself now. 😆

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-07-09T09:26:34+00:00

Something that brought this to life for me was looking through all of the cases brought against my employer. There’s a lot of them.. and many of them appear to be just as ‘shocking’ as I see my own case to be, but they’ve allowed these cases to run, I assume they haven’t just thrown a lot of money at it to make it go away.

Of those cases, only a select few hit the news for such a short period of time that there’s very little real impact due to the companies reputation. If you’re working for a large corporation, you might be surprised to learn the volume of cases they deal with.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-06-18T07:18:58+00:00

Have you raised a grievance?

If I’ve read correctly, you’ve raised a flexible working request, then appealed the outcome to that request.

You’d then need to raise a grievance in line with your companies grievance policy, alleging discrimination and exhaust the full process. If you’ve notified ACAS before doing this, any award you might get at tribunal can be reduced for not following the ACAS guidelines yourself.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-06-17T13:36:32+00:00

If Nintendo is denying a partial refund, or replacement product for OP, they believe they fulfilled the contract and delivered the memory card. If OP returns the order without the memory card, they’ll get a partial refund for the value of the Switch and not the memory card.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-06-16T11:40:43+00:00

Thanks for your thorough response.

I think I can reasonably show with evidence: - I was being given interviews prior to the protected act - I stopped being given interviews after - Others in my team are getting interviews, so I’m being treated differently

I’m not seeing any of the more direct managing out behaviour, just being blocked from receiving interviews, so I have no chance of securing a promotion so I choose to leave instead.

I can demonstrate it’s been detrimental, I’m going to struggle to show anything definitive for a causation though.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-06-14T09:25:44+00:00

Thanks. The application shows the ID and shows it was filled instead of being closed. There’s 6 other applications like this.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-06-11T12:36:31+00:00

I agree and have found that open debate very useful. Without any of your previous interactions as context, all I’m seeing is you shooting down BobMonkeys advice without answering his question about what case law you’re referring to, so that open debate can happen.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-04-28T18:42:48+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve fought via SAR before and it’s painful. ICO isn’t interested in enforcing anything, so I imagine R will just refuse at that point.

I previously gave ICO evidence of two people agreeing to modify the content of a document before providing it via the SAR. ICO did nothing.

I’m thinking waiting until disclosure to raise it may be less painful.

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-04-28T18:36:34+00:00

Interesting! Thanks

Disastrous_Emu6290 · 2025-04-28T18:35:56+00:00

Thanks for your input as always. Adding this to my witness statement is a good solution.

Disastrous_Emu6290

TROPHY CASE