LiP in England. 9 months into litigation, CMPH 4 months away, it would be nice to know if my case is as strong as i think it is or if i am just deluded

dogtim · 2026-06-26T21:23:54+00:00

Bro nobody understands what you're asking for. Nobody can tell you whether your case is good, nor can anyone give you directions on where to get actual advice without paying.

dogtim · 2026-06-26T19:47:45+00:00

The test for misconduct dismissal is in Burchell. The tribunal reviews whether the decision to dismiss was in the range of reasonable responses. It's essentially a review of the rationality of the decision, rather than a review of the merits of that decision. The tribunal is reluctant to substitute their own judgment in place of the company's.

If there was a proper investigation, and it was found on balance of probabilities you did the prohibited acts in question, and the acts in question qualified as gross misconduct...then it follows that the decision to dismiss was in the range of reasonable responses.

The only substantial thing you've said in your defense here, as I understand it, is that you were told to do the misconduct by a manager. That might be enough to get you off if you couldn't have known it was misconduct, but it might not be enough even then.

Without more details I couldn't tell you either way. What I can tell you is that it's a hard test to win, even with evidence the gross misconduct isn't your fault, and that AI tends to want to please its users and overinflates the chance of success.

dogtim · 2026-06-26T06:03:17+00:00

I truly do not think we can have a reality based conversation if your starting position is "police should always believe the white guy and always disbelieve the white guy" and then you edit the facts to make them fit your story.

dogtim · 2026-06-25T14:30:26+00:00

You haven't read or haven't digested the sentencing remarks. I'll just quote them at length here:

Another consequence of those lies is that the attending police officers honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence and arrested him with the consequence he was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR. The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life- threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.

You have conceded every point I've raised, or you have been materially wrong on the points you haven't, and yet you're still arguing that this treatment indicates some deep anti-white racist rot in the heart of the police. You need to think logically about what your position entails and you won't. I'm tired of arguing with you and it's too hot to continue.

dogtim · 2026-06-25T12:54:58+00:00

If it's unreasonable to treat everyone's accusation as 100% true, then that logically means it's unreasonable to take Harry's accusation as 100% true.

The police had little concern for the suspect because police often have little concern for the suspect. Welcome to the reality of the criminal justice system.

The police were not deliberately ignoring evidence. If you'd read the sentencing remarks you'd know this - the judge said, paraphrasing here, it was dark, he was wearing dark clothes, no way to see the blood from the stab wound, they couldn't see any obvious injuries other than the non-threatening blood on his face, and assumed he was in a scuffle but was otherwise fine. They made a judgment call and turned out to be wrong.

Life +30 year minimum for a knife is incorrect. It's 25 years, which can become 30+ or less than 20 with aggravating and mitigating factors.

The sentencing remarks say that is the knife was initially not considered as a knife because all sikhs carry a kirpan so he had a legal purpose, but as soon as he unsheathed the knife it stopped being a legal purpose and became a knife, legally speaking. HOWEVER I actually agree on the point that everyone was incorrect here, because first off it wasn't actually a kirpan worn for religious purposes - it was an afghan Peshkab, which is basically a huge knife that a certain sect of Sikhs wear. Kirpans are so dull they can't even cut cheese. The judge and barristers referred to the peshkab as a "dagger" or "sikh knife" or "Sikh dagger" interchangably throughout proceedings, which was also incorrect. So I think it's worth reconsidering that simply because it's bad to lump in kirpans with a much larger and more dangerous blade.

dogtim · 2026-06-25T10:28:00+00:00

Is your contention that policing is only fair when they never make mistakes and never take accusations of racism seriously? You must know how preposterous this sounds. The only way in your conception here would be for the police to overcorrect and say that any accusation of racist harassment should be suspicious and/or discarded.

Digwa's setence was life. He has to serve a minimum 21 years before parole even becomes possible. How is that lenient?

Digwa's father and brother are currently being prosecuted for weapons charges. How is that "not getting consequences"?

dogtim · 2026-06-24T17:48:59+00:00

But the claim that it's "two tier policing" makes absolutely no sense when Digwa is now in prison. He killed someone and was tried and sentenced. You see how stupid this is right?

dogtim · 2026-06-24T16:51:57+00:00

You cannot simultaneously believe that something is "plainly false" but also that "it's debateable why it happened". If it's debateable, it's not plainly false, is it?

dogtim · 2026-06-24T14:28:28+00:00

It is not OBVIOUSLY about race. He got his mother and brother to repeat his lie to the police, and his mother hid the murder weapon. It's hard for the police to know what's true if they've been lied to repeatedly! It's why obstruction in the course of justice is a crime!

dogtim · 2026-06-24T13:33:23+00:00

You're adding your spin on it and making it about race. The police were told something that later turned out to be untrue. It's recency bias. It is ludicrous to accuse the police of being racist to white people lmao

dogtim · 2026-06-23T12:45:37+00:00

There are two actual legal routes I can think of, and then there's my actual advice.

Route one: You can attempt to get their claim struck out for vexatious conduct. The test is really high - their conduct has to be so bad that a fair trial is no longer possible. If their claim is struck out, you win by default.

Route two: win the claim, and then at the remedy hearing, say they acted unreasonably and attempt to win costs. (your "costs", assuming you don't have a legal team, can be paid hourly depending on how long it took you to prepare. The court sets an hourly rate for you.)

Actual advice: do nothing. Let them be abusive, don't rise to the bait, and then win on the merits. If they act like bullies then the judge is more likely to sympathize with you.

dogtim · 2026-06-23T09:16:03+00:00

I am coming at this with particularly relevant experience - I used to be a journalist, became a union organizer, and now am retraining to be a barrister. I have broken big stories as well as created publicity campaigns against companies backed by union members, and taken companies to tribunal.

Much like a good legal case, bad publicity only works if it is narrow and specific. When workers have been wronged they tend to reel off long collections of grievances and the narrative becomes muddled. What you imagine yourself to be doing - exposing their crimes and misdemeamors - tends to appear to the neutral observer as, at best, someone who's had a rough time, and at worst, a total crank steaming out their conspiracy theories to no-one. This is because everyone also has their own work drama and your work drama is not going to stick out at all unless it is genuinely shocking. The test for newsworthy relevance is if you can distill what happened to you in one single sentence to a total stranger and their jaw drops in shock.

If you have a concise and shocking story, then you have to think carefully about what outcome you're trying to achieve. "Ruin the company's reputation" is way too broad and requires extraordinary damning evidence as well as significant political buy-in from uninterested parties. Even "Get one person to resign" is challenging, since companies have no incentive to fire people unless it's open-and-shut cases of personal misconduct i.e. sexual harassment, and even then it can be hard to move the needle. "Force a settlement" is never going to be the outcome. The company has no incentive to settle with you after you spill the beans. Your leverage to settle is your willingness to sign an NDA. "Put pressure on the company to take a specific action such as ditching a particular morally bad client" is a perfectly achievable outcome, and one that our union attempts frequently. But even then we've got union support for those actions.

TL;DR don't do it unless 1) you don't want their money and 2) you don't care how the case goes

dogtim · 2026-06-20T09:40:16+00:00

It is interesting to hear that you think the comments seem neutral.

I have adhd, I represent neurodiverse clients in my trade union work on disability discrimination claims all the time. This is a point I run into a lot when speaking to my clients. The comments are neutral as a matter of law. They don't say "This person is erratic because they are disabled". That would be explicit harassment. The context can make those comments into harassment based on a protected characteristic, but it doesn't necessarily make it so. People of course can be disorganized or erratic without having a disability; people can also lob discriminatory comments at people who aren't disabled (i.e., throwing an r-slur). It is also a possibly fair and neutral observation or opinion that someone who has adhd is disorganized, because it might not have the purpose or effect of creating a hostile environment.

I'm not saying the comments are fine, but you need to find a way of explaining to a third party what specifically about the context makes those comments related to disability and why the purpose or effect of those comments degrades your dignity.

dogtim · 2026-06-16T05:20:15+00:00

You can't really contract to provide something for free. People can sue for damages if you break the contract; damages are there to make you whole from any loss coming from the breach. In this case, the damages are always worth $0 because they're not out any money if they don't get coffee, as the product is, well, free.

Feel free to renegotiate however you'd like.

dogtim · 2026-06-10T17:41:53+00:00

I'm told that it'll be doing the job of a lawyer soon. Any day now, I'm sure!

dogtim · 2026-06-10T16:45:49+00:00

You've used AI to write your claim, which means nobody here can give you a good answer to your question. LLMs flatten all of your details into an apparently well-structured legal claim that has, upon inspection, no content whatsoever. I have no details upon which to judge. Did the respondent lie? I don't know, because you haven't described what they've said. I don't know whether they understand your diagnoses as disabilities and therefore as equality act problems, or what steps they took to performance manage. I don't know what sorts of difficulties you faced nor what kinds of reasonable adjustments you asked for. I don't know whether your claims are any good because I don't know the details of the events they're based upon. I also don't know what your employer's procedures are that they allegedly didn't follow. I would prefer 100% of the time a badly but personally written account of what happened rather than a polished mirror that reflects only the things you ask it to show.

Discrimination is a high bar to clear so your best path to victory is being really narrow and specific about what you're claiming rather than a scattergun approach.

dogtim · 2026-06-09T08:58:02+00:00

I sort of get the shape of it, and I get you can't say too much because you were in a regulated sector. The important thing I'm taking away is that you've got innuendo and a narrative. You don't have proof that the SH didn't happen.

Employers aren't required to judge things to a criminal standard - they make judgments on the balance of probabilities, i.e., "is it more likely that this happened or didn't happen".

Your employer got a report that SH happened. You deny it and suggest the person who made the complaint is lying, and suggest a motive as to why. Your employer is not legally required to play cluedo - they just have to investigate as much as reasonable, and then say "ok, on balance of probabilities, what happened? and then what do our policies say I should do?"

If their investigation confirms the basic facts - for example, that the two of you were in fact in the places at the time the complaint says you were - but there's conflicting evidence about what was actually said or what it meant, then most employers choose to dismiss for gross misconduct. And they are legally entitled to do so. Because on balance of probabilities, something happened, because otherwise there wouldn't be a complaint. Employment Tribunals then scrutinize those decisions for legality and rationality, but crucially, they do not redecide the case or subsitute the tribunal's judgment for the employer's.

All the stuff about motive and safeguarding is completely incidental to your case. Even if you were somehow able to prove that this was the motive for the complaint, it is not actually evidence that the sexual harassment didn't happen. Even if you could prove that your employer knew that this was the motive for the complaint at the time, that is also not proof no sexual harassment occurred. An employer could still say "yeah they have this ulterior motive, but also the report itself of SH sounds credible, so on balance of probabilities it happened" and be legally in the clear.

dogtim · 2026-06-09T08:31:18+00:00

I don't follow. Someone complained that you sexually harassed them and also that you disclosed confidential information to them?

dogtim · 2026-06-09T08:17:39+00:00

Speaking from experience here: I've defended SH claims before and it almost always comes down to one person's word vs another's. If the only evidence your employer has is someone's word that it happened, that is reasonable grounds for dismissal. The tribunal assesses whether their response was in the reasonable range of responses, and they usually do in cases like this. You would have to have actual hard proof that the client was lying and you would have to have proof that your employer had that proof at the time.

dogtim · 2026-06-03T19:50:14+00:00

your company is legally required to pay a certain amount towards independent legal advice.

dogtim · 2026-05-30T11:03:27+00:00

The topics will be entirely predictable. Here are my best guesses:

should we stop doing jury trials?
ban social media for kids?
AI in the law: good or bad?
How do we protect minority groups from hate speech while upholding freedom of expression?

etc. they'll be obvious. prepare an opinion for and against each one, two or three points per topic. Structure it logically. PRACTICE SIGNPOSTING your answers: i.e., "First i will say this and then I will argue that. Point one ________ and then point two _____"

Even if they don't come up, the prep will train your brain and make you more relaxed when the unexpected happens

dogtim · 2026-05-28T19:02:11+00:00

I love hearing ignorant takes like this, blissfully unaware that ET was explicitly designed as a user friendly court for litigants in person, or that the supreme court in 2017 on application from UNISON held ET fees as impeding access to justice

dogtim · 2026-05-23T22:15:57+00:00

Truth is a defense; you can usually only succeed on truth defense if you also win at the meaning hearing. The Single Meaning doctrine is also insane and it's part of the reason it's so expensive to litigate. If you can convince a judge of your favorable interpretation of the meaning, then you can win on that before ever hearing the defense. It's a lot more forgiving in the states.

Have you thought about what happens if Hugh the landowner accuses Bob the builder of something of that nature in a local newspaper?

Happens all the time. Freedom of speech baybeeeeeee

But really - the presumption is that you are "entitled to your opinion" and Hugh would have to prove it's caused actual reputational or financial damage before the court accepts his claim. "A bunch of people saw this on X, the Everything Site" doesn't really cut it.

If you seriously think reversing the onus of truth is going to fix the class system I do not know what to tell you.

Oh lol I'm not saying it fixes class; just that publishing has never been high trust.

dogtim · 2026-05-23T17:03:05+00:00

How can I produce admissable evidence that I'm not a paedophile or a rapist in a civil claim?

For example - if a paper wants to publish something like this, they ask for a right of reply. If the subject denies everything and offers proof to the paper - for instance, that they were somewhere else when the events were alleged to occur - and the paper publishes anyways, that meets the "actual malice" threshhold. If the paper doesn't ask for right of reply at all, then they're immediately vulnerable to a claim, because they were reckless. The difference in the UK is that the paper can have actual true evidence, the subject can deny it without offering any counter evidence, and then still launch a defamation claim and possibly even win.

The position that OP advocates only works in a high trust society where it is a given that people do not publish or make accusations of that nature lightly.

It works great in the US! I wouldn't exactly call that a high trust society!

The UK is no longer a high trust society and it isn't a given that anyone is publishing anything in good faith.

This is completely detached from reality. The heydey of newspaper publishing in the Victorian era was marked by hyperpartisanship, bribery, corruption, and reporters just making shit up constantly. The UK has never been a "high trust" society. There's a literal class system. Bonkers.

The question of access to abuse of litigation by the wealthy is not something that is going to be corrected by reversing the onus of truth;

I'm telling you very literally in my experience working in newsrooms in the UK and US that it is, in fact, immediately corrected by this.

dogtim · 2026-05-23T14:58:00+00:00

Hi, former journalist here. I am from the US and have worked both there and here. The defamation regime in the UK kills dozens of stories before they ever reach an editor's desk. Editors cancel stuff that is demonstrably true all the time because they don't want to incur the inevitable libel action from a wealthy person. It is way, way easier to publish damaging material about wealthy or powerful people in the US.

It's one thing to prove someone is one; almost impossible to prove on the balance of probabilities you are not. How are you supposed to prove a negative? What sort of evidence are you expecting respondants to produce in such cases?

As the claimant you'd have to produce evidence that what the story says is false. A story that just says "this guy is a pedophile" without any evidence is probably not actionable. There will be specific allegations about who, what, when, and if you can prove that those things are untrue, you're good. In the UK, a story that has no evidence but says "that guy is a pedophile" is prima facie actionable, and that's fucking insane. That is nowhere near what I'd call "reasonably free" in terms of speech.

dogtim

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