Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing Thread 5

[ickky]

The Tribunal started on 25th April at 10am. If you would like to view online you need to send a request for access as early as possible.

Send an email to

[email protected]

The subject heading of the email request should read

“MEDIA OR PUBLIC ACCESS REQUEST – Case number 2202172/2020 - Ms A Bailey – 25th April 2022.

Then ask for the pin for the online access.

You will be contacted with instructions on how to observe the hearing.

When joining the live tribunal please choose a non inflammatory/offensive name, everyone can see it in the chat - This is a court room, please behave accordingly.

The court chat function is there for official court purposes, not for observers, please don't use it unless you have a technical issue.

On the first page underneath where you put your screen name, select the video and mic that are not crossed out (top option), this is the courts vid and mic.
On the next page select NONE on the drop down windows for vid and mic, these are your own video and mic.

You must be muted so as to not disturb the hearing.

There is also live tweeting from

twitter.com/tribunaltweets

Abbreviations:
AB: Allison Bailey, claimant
BC: Ben Cooper QC, barrister for AB
SW = Stonewall Equality Limited (respondent 1)
IO = Ijeoma Omambala QC, senior counsel - barrister for SW
RW = Robin White junior counsel to SW - assisting IO
GC = Garden Court Chambers Limited (respondent 2) (GCC would be a better abbreviation)
AH = Andrew Hochhauser QC, senior counsel - barrister for GC
JR = Jane Russell junior counsel to GC - assisting AH
RM= Rajiv Menon QC & SH = Stephanie Harrison QC (jointly respondent 3 along with all members of GC except AB)
EJ = Employment Judge Goodman hearing the case
Panel = any one of the three panel members (EJ and two lay members)

Thread 1 www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4529887-Allison-Bailey-v-Stonewall-Employment-Tribunal-hearing?

Thread 2 www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4542466-allison-bailey-v-stonewall-employment-tribunal-hearing-thread-2

Thread 3 www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4545725-allison-bailey-v-stonewall-employment-tribunal-hearing-thread-3

Thread 4 www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4546945-allison-bailey-v-stonewall-employment-tribunal-hearing-thread-4

Okay, maybe that’s the case. Apologies if so. It’s quite unusual for that to happen though.

The shitness of the bundle is probably just time and complexity and size.

Sorry. No paragraphs.

How do they know anyone is live streaming? What's going on? Who are these SIP people?

Especially the hero-worshipping of her lawyer when he could just as well be acting for the employer, as lawyers don’t do cases based on whether they agree with their clients.

He could, yes, but it's interesting that both BC and JR were on opposing sides for the same POV in Maya Forstater's tribunals as well.

Also RMW does a lot of trans cases and AB doesn't do sexual assault/abuse cases.

A junior barrister who hasn't checked the bundles (when adding page refs into the skeleton, as an absolute minimum) is doing a spectacularly poor job. It's not about doing lowly admin, it's about ensuring your leader has everything set up properly to do his/her job, and providing proper assistance to the court. Juniors don't often do the oral advocacy (beyond maybe one or two minor witnesses), they absolutely should be all over the bundles - if your leader needs a page ref in the middle of cross examination you need to know where to find it instantly. So yes, I'd expect the junior to be alive to bundling problems and take steps to sort them out, not try and delegate to an "underpaid trainee". But I'd apply that to all the juniors on all sides tbh.

Initial impression is that the witness LT is being reasonably forthcoming. Let's see how this develops.

That's because anyone who has a court case related to GC issues these days chooses to instruct him (due to Maya's case). Jo Phoenix has retained him too I think. It's not because he personally supports one side. We have no idea what he thinks - he is representing his client and we should avoid conflating lawyers with their clients. If we do that, who will defend rapists and murderers?

It's funny that there are so many interruptions when BC is on, so 2 sips and 1 offensively named observer.

These fuckers using offensive names and disrupting the proceedings risking them being closed to observers are doing my head in.

Jackie Weaver to play EJ?

He’s nice and likeable. But whether he’s helpful I don’t know yet.

I was just thinking the same thing, ickky

It's all a bit I don't know guv

He seems pretty genuine.

A junior barrister who hasn't checked the bundles (when adding page refs into the skeleton, as an absolute minimum) is doing a spectacularly poor job. It's not about doing lowly admin, it's about ensuring your leader has everything set up properly to do his/her job, and providing proper assistance to the court. Juniors don't often do the oral advocacy (beyond maybe one or two minor witnesses), they absolutely should be all over the bundles - if your leader needs a page ref in the middle of cross examination you need to know where to find it instantly. So yes, I'd expect the junior to be alive to bundling problems and take steps to sort them out, not try and delegate to an "underpaid trainee". But I'd apply that to all the juniors on all sides tbh.

Presumably that goes for all counsel in the case then, seeing as all of them would have had skeleton arguments with page refs. Anyway, I was told on the last thread that there were loads of barristers and judges on here so maybe one of them can tell us the extent to which they, as a led junior with a solicitor instructed, would be personally responsible for producing the bundle, pagination and indexing.

I don't know but have to assume that it's something that shows up in the admin control panel/dashboard that shows you a number of things about the people logging in (about their devices, where they're logging in from, the link allocated to them etc.).

Depending on the video platform, the control panels for some of them tell you about the browser, other open applications etc. I understand the apprehensions about live-streaming. However, in the absence of additional detail which should not be shared with us, I sometimes wonder if people are logged into another meeting and that is the live-streaming, it's not that that person is live-streaming the tribunal, IYSWIM.

I will also comment that some online subtitling/captioning systems are occasionally misinterpreted as live streaming if someone has web access.

I find it perfectly believable. It’s exactly how Stonewall bed in with organisations: they target a few people who care and agree, and rely on the fact that most people have day jobs.

Mine too - it's almost like they don't WANT observers to see this section of the proceedings, isn't it.....

Hi Op, I was just coming on to message the same thing. Colour me surprised!

Also, thanks for your sterling work on creating these threads, the links, and all the info you put about how to link into this tribunal etc.

I agree with you Mr Cooper!

Also the normal order of things would be for the claimant to give evidence first. In this case they had to shift everything around so AB would have heard the evidence of some defence witnesses before she gave her evidence. I wonder if the defence may have agreed to this re-ordering on the basis that AB did not discuss any of the defence evidence with her lawyers until after she gave her own evidence. This would explain the 2 weeks embargo.

I love him a bit.

Is it to show how lovely and reasonable GCC were, and contained lots of different views? I dunno, perhaps?