What evidence do I need for my Employment Tribunal claim?

Strong evidence is key to succeeding in your Employment Tribunal claim, and if you prioritise getting on top of your evidence, this could really help you persuade the Employment Tribunal that your case should succeed. But if you’re at the stage of starting to pull together your evidence for an Employment Tribunal claim, you might not know exactly what documents you need.

Most common evidence documents for employment claims

Documents form a large amount of the evidence in most Employment Tribunal cases. This means that you’ll need to store and organise the documents that show what happened to you. 

There are a few key documents that you are likely to need for a Tribunal case:

• your employment contract
• your job description, if you have been given one for your role
• any policies and procedures that relate to the issue you are having (these will likely be found in the staff handbook)
• emails, letters or other correspondence with your employer that relates to any grievance, disciplinary, dismissal or redundancy 
• documents relating to your earnings (see below).

Other evidence documents that might be relevant

You should also consider whether there are any other documents that are relevant to your case. Here is a checklist to consider. 

• Any other emails, letters, texts, instant messages or social media messages from/to your employer that relate to the problems you had at work.
• Any other documents that might support you in showing the Tribunal the issues you have been having at work. This could be a wide range of things - for example, this could include information about your performance, such as sales figures, performance review documentation or timesheets.
• Medical evidence, if you need to demonstrate that you are disabled as part of your claim, or if medical evidence is in some way relevant to what happened to you.
• Meeting notes.
• Your diary, or anything you’ve written down about what happened. 

Evidence of your earnings

In most employment cases, it will be important to show evidence of your earnings. This can be because it is relevant to what you are claiming about - for example, if you’re claiming for unlawful deduction of wages and need to show that pay was deducted.

Evidence of your earnings also helps the Tribunal to calculate what compensation you should get if your claim is successful. For example, if you’ve left your job and the Tribunal needs to calculate your loss of earnings. The sort of evidence that is relevant includes the following.

• Payslips from your job.
• Payslips from any new jobs you have had since leaving. 
• Copies of job applications you have made and/or a table showing the jobs you’ve applied for, the dates and the outcome. This is important to show the Tribunal that you have tried to mitigate your loss of earnings (otherwise your compensation may be reduced).
• Any other evidence that relates to figuring out your loss of earnings - for example, benefits statements.

Keep your evidence organised

Once you have collected your evidence, you can start using it to back up each part of your claim. Valla makes it easy to collect and keep your evidence organised, and you can even attach evidence to a timeline of your situation to keep track of what happened, and when. Start organising your evidence today for free with Valla.