A Bigger Case Library Shouldn’t Mean More Homework

You’ve got thirty minutes to find a comparable tribunal decision. Twenty minutes later, you have forty tabs and a growing suspicion that the first one was the best.

You’re researching holiday pay. A judgment mentions it, so you open it and find the paragraph you need tucked between a wages finding and a claim that was withdrawn. Multiply that by a page of results and there goes the time you set aside to think about the case.

One published judgment in the batch we’re working through makes the point neatly. In Summers v BRJ Support Services (2601005/2025), the tribunal awarded unpaid wages, made a separate award for holiday pay and dismissed the notice pay claim after it was withdrawn. If you’re researching holiday pay, you want to see what the tribunal decided about holiday pay. A case summary that says “claim successful” leaves quite a bit of reading between you and the answer.

We’ve added another 200 published decisions to Tribuno’s test environment and we’re checking how they’re indexed. In this judgment, a missing space after a paragraph number meant our index rolled the holiday pay award into the preceding paragraph. We had the judgment in the database. We still had to fix where the citation landed.

Pick an issue from a matter you’ve already worked on and look at the first five results in your case library. Can you tell which decisions actually deal with the issue? When you open one, can you get straight to the passage you’d show a colleague? If you have to read all five from the top just to work out which one belongs in your note, you’ve found where the time goes.

That’s the work we want Tribuno to take off your desk. You’ve still got a decision to make about which cases help. With any luck, you’ll have more of your half hour left to make it.