If you have just been dismissed for speaking up, four things worth knowing before you open a chatbot

This is general information about how the process works, taken from published guidance. It is not legal advice, and if you can get advice from a union, a law centre or Acas, get it.

One. The seven days are real and nobody can extend them. If you are asking for interim relief, the claim form has to reach the tribunal within seven days of the date your employment ended. The guidance says the tribunal has no power to extend that limit. A late application is not a weak application. It is not an application.

One more thing about the clock, because it is about to get confusing. From 1 October 2026 the deadline for most employment tribunal claims doubles from three months to six. That change does not touch interim relief. The seven days stay seven days, and they stay unextendable. If you have read somewhere that you now have six months, that is a different claim from this one.

Two. Ticking the exemption box is not the same as applying. Most claims need an Acas early conciliation certificate first, and an interim relief claim is exempt from that. You claim the exemption by ticking a box at section 2.3 of the claim form. But if the form does not also contain a valid application for interim relief, the exemption does not apply and the whole form gets rejected. Anything else you were claiming on the same form goes too. If you are not sure your application is valid, getting the Acas certificate anyway costs you nothing and removes the risk.

Three. Length works against you, and you can prove that to yourself. These applications are now listed for three hours, of which one hour is the judge reading. If you file more than can be read in an hour, the judge will ask you to say which documents matter most and will look only at those. So you are choosing either way. You can choose in advance, or a judge will make you choose on the day with your case already in front of them.

The guidance is direct about which kind of case wins. Applications resting on a large number of alleged disclosures are harder to succeed with, because no single one of them can be tied clearly to the dismissal. Strong cases, the presidents write, are easily identified and explained. If you have one clear disclosure and a dismissal that followed it, lead with that.

Four. If you use AI, you are responsible for what it produces. The presidents say there is no objection in principle to using it. They also say it often produces submissions that are too long, contain irrelevant material and miss the key points, and that litigants using it have a responsibility to make sure what they submit is concise, relevant and accurate. That includes any case it cites. If a chatbot gives you a case name, and you cannot find that case yourself, do not put it in.

The most useful thing you can do with a drafting tool here is probably the opposite of what it is good at: ask it to cut.