Sedley being The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sedley of the Court of Appeal.

Interestingly, Google tracked them down on the website of the New South Wales Supreme Court. It is comforting to find that some things are universal.

First Law: Documents may be assembled in any order, provided it is not chronological, numerical or alphabetical.

Second Law: Documents shall in no circumstances be paginated continuously.

Third Law: No two copies of any bundle shall have the same pagination.

Fourth Law: Every document shall carry at least three numbers in different places.

Fifth Law: Any important documents shall be omitted.

Sixth Law: At least 10 percent of the documents shall appear more than once in the bundle.

Seventh Law: As many photocopies as practicable shall be illegible, truncated or cropped.

Eighth Law:

1. At least 80 percent of the documents shall be irrelevant.
2. Counsel shall refer in court to no more than 10 percent of the documents, but these may include as many irrelevant ones as counsel or solicitor deems appropriate.

Ninth Law: Only one side of any double-sided document shall be reproduced.

Tenth Law: Transcriptions of manuscript documents shall bear as little relation as reasonably practicable to the original.

Eleventh Law: Documents shall be held together, in the absolute discretion of the solicitor assembling them, by:

1. a steel pin sharp enough to injure the reader,
2. a staple too short to penetrate the full thickness of the bundle.
3. tape binding so stitched that the bundle cannot be fully opened, or,
4. a ring or arch-binder, so damaged that the two arcs do not meet.

Or, in English, the time you spend on an issue in tribunal should be proportional to the importance of the issue and its complexity.

The amount of time you spend on something will send a message to the tribunal. The more time you spend on a point the more important you suggest that it is.

So, all else being equal, you should spend the most time on your important points.

However, all else is not equal and you will have to take account of how complex your points are. A difficult issue takes more time to deal with. And if what you have to say is short and simple it does no good (and normally does harm) to keep talking once you’ve made the point.

It is sometimes worth flagging up exceptions to the general rule. For example you might say “Sir, my next point is really the key to this case, but it’s a simple point and I will be brief.” Similarly, you might say “Madam, the contractual point is rather difficult and I’m afraid I’m going to have to spend rather a lot of time on it.”

Update: A reader points out that, arguably, the equation should be importance multiplied by difficulty; rather than importance divided by difficulty. This is correct - unless difficulty is expressed as a number greater than zero but equal or less than 1. This may be a post event rationalisation, but it preserves the original formula.

It is important to know thyself.

But it is just as useful to know others.

One part of this is listening to what the other side is saying, so that you can engage sensibly. After all, you wouldn’t close your eyes in a sword-fight.

But another part is that your opponents will often have good ideas about tactics that you haven’t thought of or haven’t encountered before. When you spot these, remember them and use them in the future.

Similarly, if you opponent blunders, note what they have done and resolve not to do it yourself.

Reading Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings - the classic Japanese treatise on strategy from which this post’s title, and martial metaphors, are taken is optional.

Simon Myerson Q.C., who writes at Pupillage and how to get it, has been talking about self-criticism.

Although he’s speaking mostly in the context of interviews for pupillage (the final stage of a barrister’s training), his advice is good and much more widely applicable.

This is an issue I used to force under my own pupils’ noses. If you lose a case, the temptation is to blame your client, your opponent, the witnesses and the Judge. It may all be true. But 99.9% of the time there is something which you could have done to make a difference. People who are going to be good barristers cannot afford to be frightened of the process of self-criticism which identifies what that is.

This is a very good habit to get into. You’re not perfect, and you’re never going to be - because no-one is - but the way to improve is to identify some of your imperfections and do your best to fix them. This will not make you perfect, but it will make you better.

As Simon acknowledges, this is not a comfortable process. The best way of dealing with that is to make it a routine. At the end of every case, just spend five minutes thinking about whether you made any mistakes and whether you should do anything differently next time.

How you do this is a very personal thing. You might want to keep a diary, or talk about it with someone you trust, or just make a mental note on the train home. You might even start a blog.

There are a few warnings about this.

First, remember that you can only do one thing at a time. Trying to analyse your performance during a hearing is rarely a good idea. You will be far too close to it to draw sensible conclusions, much less implement them. You will just end up making yourself more stressed.

This is subtly different to seeing how a case is going and adjusting accordingly. Broadly, if you are planning what to do next, you’re okay. If you are beating yourself up about what you have already done, you need to get your head back in the game.

Secondly, remember the making mistakes or being less than perfect is not the same as professional negligence. Negligence - in very broad terms - is making a serious and stupid mistake, which means you have failed in your duty to your client. There is sometimes a tendency, both in clients and lawyers, to regard all imperfections as negligent. This is just not the case.

Of course, this post is aimed at people who are, or who want to be, professional representatives, and can be assumed to want to get as good at the job as it is in them to be. If you are a litigant in person you want to win your case. If you catch yourself wanting to become a better litigant long-term, find another hobby - fast.

It is a truth generally acknowledged that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs are evil. But nobody is totally evil. And even the Revenue has its good points.

One of these is that they provide some useful online help for calculating certain statutory payments. If you need to calculate:

• Statutory Adoption Pay
• Statutory Maternity Pay
• Statutory Paternity Pay
• Statutory Sick Pay

You can enter the relevant information on the Revenue website and it will do the hard sums for you.

Statutory payments calculators

When you turn up to a tribunal hearing you should bring with you all the relevant papers.

This sounds obvious, but in practice it is easy to make mistakes. Here are two examples:

CMDs and PHRs

These are still hearings and you will still need papers.

You will not necessarily need everything. In particular, much of the evidence can be left at home for a CMD (particularly if it runs to more than one lever-arch file). And in a PHR you will only need the evidence relating to the issues that will be dealt with at the hearing.

But err on the side of caution. It is normally better to drag an extra file to the tribunal than be without it if the vital document is inside.

Correspondence file and attendance notes

By the time you reach the hearing, you should normally have a medium to large file of letters between you, the tribunal, the other side and anyone else relevant to the case. It should also contain notes of conversations you’ve had, in person or by phone.

Bring this file along. It is the only way of dealing with issues of who said what to whom when. This sort of thing comes up often in tribunals. For example, you may need to know when a document was sent to the respondent. If you have your file you can easily find out and give a precise answer - with some evidence to back it up. Otherwise you are left saying something like “I think it was sent sometime in March”, which is much less convincing.

Someone recently found this blog by the search ‘What to do when the evidence against you is overwhelming.’ The best answer to this is ‘give up.’

The reason that’s not as obvious as it sounds is that sometimes the evidence against you is overwhelming even though you are in the right.

Being in the right is not a good reason to fight a losing battle. It is only sensible to bring an employment tribunal claim against your employer if you think on balance that you will win it, and that you will get enough compensation to justify the costs (financial and emotional) of running it.

If the evidence against you is overwhelming, you will almost certainly lose. No doubt there are circumstances in which it is right or necessary to fight a battle you are almost certain to lose, but they rarely if ever come along in the context of employment tribunal litigation.

Putting page numbers in a bundle is a dull job - and guess what? Nobody has to do it.

Surprisingly few of those who put bundles together seem to know that modern photocopiers will add page numbers automatically. Instead, they scrawl semi-legible numbers in by hand; or, worse, they use a mechanical paginating contraption. This is a menace: it is horrible to use, because it gets ink all over your fingers, and is liable to arbitrary jams and repeats - so although it is a very dull task, you have to stay wide awake and attentive while you’re doing it, or it will go horribly wrong. And it is almost certainly running out of ink, so you have to bring it down on the page with savage force or it won’t print at all.

Reading the photocopier manual is dull, but at least you’ll only have to do it once - and ever after your bundles will be beautifully and legibly paginated. Anyway until the machine stops.

A common experience in litigation is nervousness about facing the other side in tribunal.

This can happen to almost anyone. Litigants in person are often intimidated if their opponent is a lawyer. A CAB adviser might be nervous of specialist counsel. And there are a few QCs everyone is a bit scared of.

Unfortunately, these fears are, at least to some extent, justified. Representation will help the side that has it; and the better the representation, the more it will help. All other things being equal, a litigant with an excellent representative will be more likely to win than one who isn’t represented.

The reasons for this are simple, if unfair. The better the representative the better the case will be presented. The right points will be taken, arguments will be presented persuasively and, perhaps most importantly, witnesses will be cross-examined effectively.

In general, an experienced lawyer will do all of this better than a litigant in person or lay-representative. People who become lawyers are likely to have a certain amount of aptitude for the job. Then they are trained, both in the law and in how to run a case. Finally, they have a good deal of experience in representing clients.

At the extreme end, this means that you may find yourself facing an outstandingly clever person with a natural talent for advocacy who has spent years in practice, honing their skills. It is perfectly rational to be nervous about this.

There are, however, a few things to bear in mind.

Most importantly, other things are never completely equal. The single most important factor in deciding the result of a case is what actually happened. Nobody can turn a weak case into a strong case or vice versa. If on learning that you were pregnant, your employer sacked you on the spot and then sent you a letter complaining of your disloyalty in putting family before your job, then you will win your unfair dismissal and sex discrimination even if your employer is represented by the most brilliant QC in the land.

What good advocates can do is move the probabilities about. If the chances of winning are more or less 50 / 50, good representation might make it 60 / 40. Similarly, when dealing with remedy, representation might make the difference between an award of £4,000 and £7,000. This is still important, but a much less scary way of looking at it.

Also remember that your opponent’s ability and experience is to a large part absorbed by dealing with things that you do not have to do. Lawyers do not deal with one case at a time. They deal with dozens, or fifty. A great deal of their work is mastering the facts and law relating to all these cases. As a litigant in person, you don’t have to do any of that. You know your case inside out, because it is your case.

On the other hand, as a litigant in person, or even an inexperienced advocate, you do have some advantages. The tribunal will probably cut you more slack, and they will expect to do more work themselves. They will expect you to explain why you think your dismissal was unfair or how you were discriminated against. But they will also expect to do a lot of the work in translating your account into legal language. Similarly, they will expect to have to engage more closely with the evidence, even examining witnesses if necessary, than they would if you were represented.

And finally - if you do find yourself facing someone with a fearsome reputation, consider this. Lawyers with fearsome reputations generally charge fearsome fees. This has two potentially helpful implications: first, your employer must be seriously worried to be spending this much defending your case. That means they think you’ve got a good case. Secondly, it pushes up the settlement value of your case: if your claim is listed for a 10 day hearing and your employer has instructed a barrister who doesn’t get out of bed for less than £3,000 a day, that’s £30,000 they won’t have to spend if you agree to settle the case.

When considering a case a tribunal will inevitably take some account of the way people act during the litigation. This is one reason why it’s best to behave in a sensible and reasonable manner.

It is particularly important not act in a way that directly undermines your case. If, for example, the respondent says that you were dismissed for acting in an aggressive and angry manner, try not to blow up during cross-examination. And, if you were dismissed for persistent lateness (which you deny), it is vital that you not turn up half an hour after the hearing was supposed to start.