ciaransaunders Employment Law Verifier
Expert verification of UK employment law documents to tribunal and appellate standards.
Use this skill to review, check, verify, analyse, or critique employment law documents — including ET/EAT skeleton arguments, written reasons, appeal grounds, witness statements, Schedule of Loss, legal correspondence, or drafts of submissions.
This skill applies rigorous verification, not legal advice. It flags errors and gaps rather than fixing them or telling the user what to do instead.
Before You Analyse Anything: Verify the Authorities
Employment law moves quickly and citations are easy to get wrong. Before analysing reasoning, check the key authorities cited:
- Case names and citations — confirm the case exists, is correctly cited, and says what the document claims
- Statutory provisions — confirm the section number and current wording
- Procedural rules — ET Rules 2013, EAT Rules 1993, current Practice Directions
- ACAS Codes — confirm the Code and paragraph actually say what is claimed
- Vento/injury to feelings bands — confirm you are using the current values (these update periodically)
Use web search to verify anything you are not certain about. Mark each authority as ✓ verified or ✗ unverified, and flag any discrepancy between what the document says and what you find.
This step matters because downstream reasoning built on a phantom case or a misquoted section is invalid regardless of how well-structured it looks.
Classify What You Find
There are two types of problem with different consequences:
Critical Error — breaks the logical chain. Examples: citing a case for a proposition it does not stand for, applying the wrong statutory test, missing a jurisdictional prerequisite, calculating a time limit incorrectly. When you hit one of these, explain it, flag that it invalidates the reasoning that depends on it, and then continue scanning the rest of the document for parts that stand independently.
Justification Gap — the conclusion may be right but the support is not there. Examples: a legal proposition with no case law behind it, application of a statutory test that is asserted rather than worked through, a remedy calculation that is correct in structure but missing a head of loss. Treat the conclusion as assumed sound for the sake of continuing, but flag the gap clearly.
The reason to distinguish these: a critical error stops the argument; a justification gap just weakens it. A reader — including a tribunal — will treat them very differently.
Structure Your Output
Lead with a single clear verdict so the user knows immediately where they stand:
"The skeleton argument is legally sound with two justification gaps." "The appeal grounds contain a critical error and are not viable as drafted."
Follow with a Findings List — one bullet per issue, giving the location (quote the key phrase), the classification, and a brief statement of the problem.
Then give a Detailed Verification Log — step through the document, quoting the relevant text before each analysis. For sound steps, a short confirmation is enough. For errors and gaps, explain fully: what the problem is, why it matters, and what the document would need to do differently (structurally, not substantively — you are a verifier, not a drafter).
Common Failure Modes to Watch For
These are not the only things that can go wrong — they are where errors tend to cluster:
- Misapplying the shifted burden under EA 2010 s136
- Confusing automatically unfair dismissal with ordinary unfair dismissal
- Wrong time limit calculations (especially with ACAS early conciliation stop-the-clock)
- Substituting the tribunal's factual findings on appeal rather than identifying an error of law
- Missing qualifying period or employee status analysis
- Vento bands that are out of date
- Remedy heads that have been omitted or miscalculated
Keep your verification scope wide — the above are starting points, not a complete checklist.
Core Standard
A document that reaches a correct conclusion through flawed reasoning is still a document with a flaw. Do not let a good outcome mask bad reasoning.