Mr J. Banerjee v The Royal Bank of Canada (London Branch) — 2017

At this preliminary hearing on a claim started in March 2017, the tribunal dealt with the claimant’s application for the costs of postponing the final hearing listed for October 2017. The claimant said the postponement was caused by the respondent’s late and incomplete disclosure, and the tribunal recorded that the respondent sent further batches of documents after the disclosure deadline, with no consolidated or paginated bundle. The tribunal found the respondent was in breach of the disclosure order dated 21 June 2017, knew disclosure was incomplete when it wrote on 25 July 2017, and had not explained why the search was not completed earlier.

Employment Judge Goodman found that the respondent’s conduct placed the unrepresented claimant at a substantial disadvantage, because he had to sort and read multiple bundles without solicitors or paralegal support, and the omission of the claimant’s documents from the hearing bundle compounded the problem. The tribunal held that the respondent was responsible for the need to postpone the hearing and that it was appropriate, in the exercise of discretion under rule 76, to award the claimant his costs of the postponement. The judgment also noted that the tribunal did not need to decide whether the respondent had acted unreasonably, although its failure to cooperate with slippage in the timetable was said likely to amount to unreasonable conduct.