Litigant in person, Hanady, worked for two and a half years as one of four product managers at a company before being made redundant in February 2025.
Claims brought: unfair dismissal, and direct discrimination on the grounds of sex and race.
Outcome: Hanady won her unfair dismissal claim and was awarded £4,000, representing herself throughout. Her discrimination claim was not successful but she still felt a strong sense of justice on the outcome of her case.
Support:
Support: guided by Valla, including coaching from Valla legal experts at key stages, the Valla timeline feature, ET1 review and Valla's webinars.
From the start, the process felt unfair. Hanady pressed for answers during consultation but didn't get straight ones, and she came to believe the decision had been made before the process even began. Having seen the company let people go without due process before, she was alert to the warning signs early.
She brought claims of unfair dismissal and direct discrimination on the grounds of sex and race.
Hanady consulted a solicitor during her redundancy consultation and paid over £250 for a 45-minute session. By the time she reached Acas Early Conciliation and calculated her potential losses, the numbers just didn't add up:
"The difference in what I had to pay a lawyer to represent me versus what I'm gonna get back was… I'm in loss even if I win everything."
This is when Hanady realised that representing herself became the only financially viable route. Around the same time she found Valla's videos on YouTube, and it clicked for her that self-representation was possible with many people doing it.
Hanady was honest that she didn't start out organised.
Early on, it was a matter of getting everything out of her head and trying to make sense of it. Making sense of what she experienced and why it felt wrong. As she learned more about the redundancy process and UK employment law, her knowledge expanded and she locked in on her preparation. It included:
The hardest part for Hanady was the sheer volume of detail she compartmentalised in her head: small things that had been said or had happened, none of them yet connected to a specific claim. Her solution was a mind map, built in Miro, a free online tool.
She listed every detail as a bullet point, then created a map for each claim. Under each claim she placed the questions from the list of issues, the questions the tribunal would answer at the hearing, and slotted her facts against them. That made it easy to see what was strong and what wasn't:
"This is not very relevant. I'm going to remove it. It's just going to waste my time and waste the tribunal's time".
After watching a Valla webinar on how to read a case, Hanady used AI to help her find past tribunal decisions similar to her own then went and read them herself. She added what she learned to her Miro board: how a fair redundancy should be run, where it can fail, and how her experiences and the facts compared.
You can read real decisions on the Employment Tribunal decisions database on Gov.uk, or check out example cases Valla has collected by claim type in our real examples section.
Close to her hearing, at her coach's suggestion, Hanady wrote a skeleton argument outlining where the pool selection went wrong, where the predetermination showed, and the specifics behind each point. Her one regret is not doing it earlier. With it in place in the first few months, she would have approached disclosure, her witness statement and the hearing itself with that argument in mind.
Hanady's case took around a year and three months from start to finish. Throughout, every email from the tribunal or the other side's lawyers brought a sense of dread, and she thought about giving up more than once.
The day before her final hearing was the hardest. Alongside the anxiety came doubt: these were people she had worked with for two and a half years. What if she was being unfair to them, or even.. ungrateful?
What kept her going was someone outside the case reminding her of what had actually happened. Hanady had been seeing a therapist throughout her time at the company, and each time she wanted to quit, her therapist would play back the unfair treatment she'd described at the time and ask where the anger she'd felt then had gone.
"Lean into that and use it to propel you forward so that you can keep going."
Anger shouldn't run the show, but it can be used as fuel when you're ready to give up and you remember what you went through. You’re allowed to be angry.
Many litigants in person picture the judge as intimidating, however Hanady found her experience quite opposite. Her judge was fair to both sides and aware that a litigant in person is at a disadvantage. Twice during cross-examination, the judge stepped in to stop the respondent's counsel pressing a line of questioning that tried to get Hanady to agree to something that wasn't true.
In the written judgment, the judge accepted Hanady's evidence and did not accept parts of the respondent's. Hanady puts her credibility down to one decision she made early: she would stick to the facts, and if she lost on the facts, she'd lose with her integrity intact.
"I'm not gonna lie to win a case."
That meant conceding points when the other side made a fair one rather than arguing just for the sake of it. Credibility is built in consistency and tribunals notice this.
Hanady won her unfair dismissal claim and was awarded £4,000.
Her claims for sex and race discrimination were not successful but it was still one of the most useful lessons for Hanady and her case.
Direct discrimination claims usually follow a two-stage test. First, the claimant has to show facts from which the tribunal could conclude that discrimination might have happened. If they do, the burden shifts to the employer to prove that discrimination was not the reason for the treatment.
Hanady passed the first stage. The tribunal accepted that she had been treated less favourably and that discrimination could have been the reason. At the second stage, the respondent argued that any less favourable treatment came from her manager, not the CEO who ran her consultation. Her manager had been made redundant at the same time and did not give evidence.
In the end, the tribunal found the dismissal was unfair because of how the process was run, and that this same flawed process, rather than her sex or race, explained what happened. As Hanady put it, the thing that won her unfair dismissal claim is the thing that lost her the discrimination claim.
The judge gave Hanady an opening during her closing statement to connect her dismissal to discrimination. Exhausted and overwhelmed, she carried on with what she had prepared. Her takeaway: the same facts can win under one legal test and lose under another. So plan your arguments and your closing statement, around the specific test for each claim.
"Even if you lose, how proud are you that you went through a process that you knew nothing about, stood in front of a judge, argued your case and stood up for yourself. That is still a massive win for you."
Hanady used Valla when she needed it, especially during a case that ran for over a year with long quiet stretches in between. She drew on:
Hanady first found Valla through our YouTube videos, and attended many of our webinars before coming back to share her own story at one. She describes Valla's bite-sized content as the thing that surfaced what she didn't know to look for:
"These videos are like, what are the unknown unknowns that I haven't heard of yet to go research."
Hanady's story shows that winning as a litigant in person doesn't mean you have to be organised from day one or feel confident all the way through. It comes from learning step by step, getting support when you need it, and holding onto the truth of your case.
This case study is based on Hanady's account of her tribunal journey, shared in a Valla webinar. Some details have been generalised to protect confidentiality.