Similar Facts. Very Different Decisions.

Search hands you two decisions about the same workplace issue. Promising! They may be cousins, though, rather than twins. Matching words tell you where to look; they do not tell you what the decisions have in common, or whether the difference is the interesting bit.

For employment tribunal research, finding is only the first move. A decision earns a place in the file because of what it actually says and how that relates to the question. A neat list with the right phrases highlighted is a start. It is not the comparison.

We're laying the foundations: a dependable route from published decisions to useful research. Clever surfaces can wait; first, a relevant case has to be findable.

In an illustrative search about workplace investigations, two decisions mention witness interviews. In one, interviews happened before the decision. In the other, someone argued they should have happened. A summary saying both “involved witness interviews” would smooth over exactly the detail the researcher came to find.

Neither passage settles the wider question on its own. Read the surrounding account: what happened, what was disputed and how did the decision deal with it? Sometimes a case is worth saving for the difference it reveals, not the similarity that got it into the results.

Tribuno starts with the source trail: find decisions, inspect the material and compare facts before working towards a cited research memo. It is research support, not a prediction of what a client will win. Keep the original decision close when a promising comparison gets complicated. That is often when it gets interesting.

For each decision worth keeping, jot down: relevant because; different because; still to check. If those lines are hard to finish, the case may need more reading before it carries much weight. Search finds possibilities. Research works out which ones deserve a second look.