The one emergency power a sacked whistleblower has went from about twenty applications a year to about twenty a month, and the judges have given themselves an hour to read each one

If you are dismissed for reporting something dangerous at your work, there is one thing you can do that is faster than waiting for a hearing. It is called interim relief. A judge can order your employer to take you back, or to keep paying you, until the case is heard. It exists because a whistleblower who loses their income usually loses the fight, whatever the tribunal decides two years later.

It is not much used. In previous years, across the whole of Great Britain, the employment tribunals would receive perhaps twenty such applications a year. That is the figure in guidance issued on 22 June by Judge Barry Clarke and Judge Susan Walker, the presidents of the employment tribunals for England and Wales and for Scotland. In the same paragraph they say that most offices are now receiving a similar number each month.

Take the most cautious version of that. One office, twenty a month, is 240 a year. Twelve times what the entire country used to see. And they say most offices.

The judges give a reason for issuing the guidance at all, and it is stated plainly: the applications often indicate the use of artificial intelligence, and they arrive with far more documentation than they used to. Elsewhere in the same document the presidents say that submissions generated using AI often turn out too long, too complex, full of irrelevant material, and failing to focus on the key points.

I want to be exact about what they did not say in this document, because it is the tempting version and it is not on the page. They did not say AI caused the rise. In March, in the minutes of a user group meeting, the same President recorded the shared view of judges that AI was likely behind an increase in applications for interim relief, and called it anecdotal and a partial cause. In June, in the guidance that carries weight, they left the cause alone. The narrowing is deliberate, and it is the more honest document for it.

What they did next is the part I keep returning to. These applications get listed quickly because they are emergencies, and to make room the tribunal postpones other people's hearings. So the guidance sets a default: one judge, by video, three hours, of which one hour is for reading. File more than can be read in an hour and the judge will make you say which documents matter and ignore the rest.

A court has put a stopwatch on its own attention because producing documents stopped costing anything.

We wrote in Issue 34, in the evening edition, about the state using AI to sort the evidence in your case. This is the other end of the same process and the other party: it is the person filing, not the institution investigating, and the institution responding to them.

The thing worth sitting with is not that people used a chatbot. It is that the tribunal was built as a court an ordinary person could use without a lawyer, the last cost of doing that has now fallen away, and the result is that the people it was built for are waiting behind everyone who found it easy.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.