Receiving An Employment Tribunal Claim: An Employers Guide

You need to make sure you keep the ET1 and ET3 forms together and note the deadline for the response to be submitted. Start to gather the information you need to write a comprehensive response.

Seek advice to ensure you know your rights and respond appropriately to all aspects of the claim. Employment tribunal representation can advise you on what to do next and will notify you initially on the formalities and later on the case’s merits. Your advisor should also look at time limits to see if the claimant has issued their claim in time.

Generally speaking, most claims should be submitted within 3 months of the event detailed in the complaint. Employees have only 3 months to submit a claim to the ACAS employment tribunal from when their employment ends or the event or issue the claim is about. This changes on a case-by-case basis and depends on the length and dates of the early conciliation period. However, the claim may be struck out if the claimant submits their claim outside the three-month time limit.

Avensure offer advice and representation in Employment Tribunals for employers. Avensure can draft the ET3 with you and respond to the claim on your behalf; we can even put ourselves on record as your representatives meaning all further correspondence comes to us and not you.

You need to write down your version of events. The ET1 is very one-sided as it is what the claimant says happened. The ET3 response form is your chance to get across your version of events. You need to cover every aspect of your version of events in the ET3. Failing to mention or plead something in the ET3 could be detrimental later.

If you cannot fit all you have to say onto the ET3 response form, you can use extra sheets of paper, but you must submit an ET3 response with the mandatory fields completed. Please remember that if you state something on the ET3, you are best off having evidence to support what you say. Irrelevant or incorrect assertions can undermine your case because this is the first document the Employment Judge will read from the respondent.

You MUST submit the defence by the time limit imposed by the workplace tribunal; you will have 28 days to submit the ET3 claim from the date the notification and forms were sent to you, so you need to act on it immediately and not put the papers in a drawer hoping that the issues will go away. Also, keep a copy of the ET3 for your records and send the original back to the Employment Tribunal, but make sure you have a copy to refer to later.

If the deadline says that it is on the 5th, then the employment tribunal needs to have received the ET3 by the 5th. It will be late if you send the ET3 response form on the 5th by first class post!

If you don’t respond correctly or in time, you are taking a risk because you may:

• Be precluded from participating in the proceedings – this is highly detrimental to the case because if you fail to respond and then later want to participate, your participation may be limited or even wholly refused by the Employment Judge.
• Receive a Default Judgement against you – a judgement that says, ‘the claimant has submitted the form, the respondent has failed to reply, so the claimant wins’. Without a response from the ET3 response form, the claimant will likely be awarded most, if not all, of the compensation they sought.

Avensure offers advice and representation when defending employment tribunal claims. Avensure can draft the ET3 response form with you and respond to the claim on your behalf; we can even put ourselves on record as your tribunal claim solicitors, meaning all further correspondence comes to us, not you.