Tribunal Submissions Editing and Proofreading Services

Someone brings a complaint to a tribunal and writes a submission explaining what happened to them, thoroughly and in order. The tribunal's decision, when it comes, works through four numbered questions drawn from the legislation it operates under, and finds against the applicant on the second. Reading it afterwards, the applicant realises they had a good answer to that question. They had simply never known it was one of the four, because nothing in the process told them the decision would be structured that way.

We edit what people submit to tribunals — written submissions and statements of case, responses to the other party's submissions, applications, forms and directions responses, witness statements and supporting declarations, chronologies and schedules of loss, bundle indexes and evidence references, requests for extensions or postponements, and post-hearing written closing submissions. Our editors work on the submission a panel will convert into numbered findings.

A tribunal submission is answered by a decision organised around the specific questions the tribunal must decide, and its failure is a chronological account that leaves the panel to sort your material into their framework themselves. We work through these so the submission is organised around the questions the tribunal actually has to answer, taking each in turn under its own heading, since a panel drafting numbered findings works far more readily from a document already arranged that way; so each question is answered directly at the start of its section before the supporting detail, given that a panel reading for your position on an issue should not have to infer it from three paragraphs of background; so the facts you rely on are stated separately from the inferences you draw, because a tribunal will accept or reject each independently and material that mixes them can be discarded together; so anything the other party has conceded or not disputed is identified as such, since a panel that cannot tell which facts are actually in issue spends its attention on matters nobody is arguing about; and so the remedy is stated in the terms the tribunal has power to grant, given that a submission asking for something outside the tribunal's powers may succeed on the facts and still deliver nothing. Submissions written this way match the shape of the decision.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including case materials, evidence and personal circumstances. We are editors rather than advocates, legal representatives or advisers, and we offer no view on the law, the tribunal's powers, your prospects or what you should argue. What we can do is make sure your submission is organised so a panel can follow it.