Supported Self-Representation
How do you negotiate a fair ‘settlement agreement‘ exit package deal when leaving your job after being badly treated at work?
With our Supported Self Representation tools you can have the confidence and the tools you need to represent yourself.
It may seem complex and daunting but with the right approach, most people can represent themselves. You’ve really got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
1. Assess the strength of your case
If you have a strong case, your employer is more likely to negotiate a deal because of the risk that you might take them to an employment tribunal and win. Try our ‘Do I have a case‘ app to assess the strength of your case.
2. Decide on your negotiating strategy
So you’ve tried ‘Do I have a case’. You believe that you may have a reasonably strong case. Next you need to decide on your negotiating strategy. Read these two articles to help you:
Generally we would recommend that your best negotiating strategy is to write a ‘without prejudice’ letter to your employer, setting out your case.
Why? A decent without prejudice letter will normally get a reply from the employer setting out their side of the story.
This will flush out their counter arguments and help you to understand what extra evidence you may need to obtain in order to negotiate a decent settlement.
3. Write a without prejudice letter
It may seem a bit daunting writing a without prejudice letter to your employer about your issues. This may be the first (and hopefully only!) time in your career that you’ll ever have to write one. But don’t worry.
‘Without prejudice’ basically means off the record, so it can’t be used against you later on if you don’t get it right. For example it couldn’t be used in an investigation at work, and it couldn’t be referred to by a judge in any employment tribunal claim which you may later decide to start.
Depending on your type of case, there are a some letter builder tools on this website which will create first drafts of letters for you – you just have to fill in a few individual details.
- You can access them here via Monaco Solicitors AI Letters.
If you’d like to see examples of a selection of without prejudice letters, have a look at our documents section:
You can read about how to write a good without prejudice letter yourself in our guides here:
4. Assess your employer’s response
Broadly speaking, there are 3 types of response which you might be met with:
Complete denial
This can include writing back to you telling you how you have no hope at all and that they are not willing to negotiate. If this happens then it’s time to escalate matters.
Partial denial
This can include writing back to you telling you how you have no hope at all and that they are not willing to negotiate, but then leaving a glimmer of hope. It could be inviting you to a meeting. It could be asking for more information in writing. At this point, you need to start responding to their specific queries. Often a negotiation process is hampered by misunderstandings in and about the facts, which can be ironed out by email.
No reply
Often an employer won’t respond at all, or will acknowledge receipt of your letter but not get back to you properly. This is frustrating but you need to chase them. If you’ve chased them then it’s time to escalate matters.
5. Escalate matters internally
There are several ways that you can progress matters internally, including the following:
Submit a formal grievance letter:
If you’re still employed, you can submit a formal written grievance under your employer’s internal procedure. You can read about that in our guide on grievances and you can find lots of examples of grievance letters here.
You can use the same structure for your formal grievance letter that you used for your without prejudice letter, but remove any mention of settlement or tribunal. So it’s just a statement of facts regarding what happened to you in the past.
Writing a grievance letter lets your employer know that you are not planning to give up, so it’s another reason for them to offer you a settlement.
Make a Data Subject Access Request:
Another effective method of encouraging your employer to enter into a settlement agreement with you is to raise a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). A DSAR is basically a request of all the information which your employer holds relating to you, including for example internal emails where they may have been bad mouthing you.
You can read more about them in our DSAR guide and you can also see examples of DSARs here.
6. Escalate matters externally
It’s very important that you obtain a certificate from Acas (the organisation responsible for overseeing the initial tribunals claims process) before your 3 month time limit has expired. You can read about how to do that in our guide on ‘commencing the Acas pre-claim process’ and you can also read about the 3 month time limit that you have to complete the process.
Once you have your Acas certificate, you will have up to a month to issue an employment tribunal claim. You can read about how to do that in our guide on employment tribunals and you can have a look at our example employment tribunal claim documents.
7. Settlement agreement offers
If at any stage you get offered a settlement agreement then try to play it cool. Don’t accept the first offer your employer makes. Why not use our settlement agreement calculator to see how much you could be entitled too.
And once you have received a settlement offer, contact us for a free consultation and we will be able to represent you (at no charge to you), either to increase the amount or to review and sign the settlement agreement document itself.
You don’t have to pay for this because there is always an amount of money for legal fees set out in the settlement agreement document itself. This is to cover the legal costs of going through the lengthy settlement agreement document with you. It doesn’t result in any additional cost to you, as your lawyer will invoice your employer separately for it.
When we go through the draft settlement agreement in detail with you, we’ll also discuss whether you should try to negotiate an increased amount. We might be able to do this for you on a no win no fee basis.
Once you are happy with the deal set out in the document, we countersign it to confirm that all of the legal wording in the document has been explained to you in plain English.