The certificate arrives on a Tuesday, and with it comes a form called an ET1 — the claim form for the employment tribunal — which costs nothing to submit. The catch is not the fee; it is the deadline, usually three months less one day from the thing that happened, and the calendar has been quietly eating it while you weren’t looking.
The certificate is a PDF with a number on it, and that number is the only warm thing about it, because it is your key into the whole process. You did the ACAS part already. Early conciliation — the step you cannot skip, because you have to notify ACAS before you are allowed to claim, and a conciliator spends some weeks trying to settle it before it ever becomes a case. It didn’t settle. Maybe you knew it wouldn’t. But without that certificate number there is no valid ET1. So you have the number now, and you paste it into its box. The easiest box on the form. The only one that arrived pre-filled by someone else.
Then the form gets harder.
The ET1 wants dates. When you started. When it ended, or when the thing happened. It wants to know which kind of claim — unfair dismissal, discrimination, unpaid wages, or more than one at once — and the boxes do not explain the difference between them, because the form is not a teacher. It is a container. Tick the wrong thing and you have not lied, exactly. You have just aimed at the wrong target.
And then the big box: give details of your claim. This is where the whole thing lives. Everything you have carried for three months — the meeting, the email that changed tone, the week they stopped inviting you to things — has to become a numbered sequence of facts. Not a feeling. Not an outrage. Facts, in order, dated where you can date them. This is the part people put off. This is the part where the deadline catches them.
Because here is the thing about the clock. When you notified ACAS, it paused. In ACAS’s own words, once you have notified them within your time limit you will have “at least 1 month from the date you received the certificate” to make your claim. At least a month. It sounds generous. It is not, when the month is spent staring at that box.
None of this is a reason to freeze, and none of it needs paying for. The ACAS helpline is free, and its website explains what each type of claim actually means. Citizens Advice is free. GOV.UK holds the ET1 itself, with plain-English notes on how to complete it. Use them. Nobody should draft a claim in the dark when the lights are on and free.
But the notes tell you what the box is for. They do not sit beside you while you fill it. They do not take the tangle in your head and lay it out as: on this date, this was said; on this date, this was done; and the effect was this. That translation — from the thing that happened into the grounds of a claim — is the actual work. It is also, precisely, the work people dread, which is why they leave it until the month is nearly gone.
This is where Chris comes in — late, on purpose. Not to tell you whether your claim is a good one; no technology should promise that, and ours does not. Chris is there to ask the plain questions in the right order. When did you start. What is the date on the certificate. What happened, and then what happened after that. Our technology takes your answers and sets them down in the shape the ET1 expects: the dates in the date fields, the claim types where they belong, and the account written out as grounds of claim — numbered, dated, in order — so that when the tribunal reads that box, it reads a case, not a cry.
At the end you have the thing you came for. A completed ET1. Grounds of claim you can read back and recognise as true. The certificate number sitting where it always went. Ready to submit, before the month runs out.
When the next form lands — and with a tribunal, another one usually does — you know where we are.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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