AI Pre-Tribunal SAR + Evidence Pack Builder for UK Employees
Tribunal-Ready ET1 in Under an Hour
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A guided web app that builds a UK employee's full pre-Employment-Tribunal evidence package: ICO-compliant Subject Access Requests to the employer (and third parties like occupational health, payroll, and parent companies), an AI timeline that auto-imports emails, Slack/Teams exports, and WhatsApp screenshots, classifies every item by claim type (unfair dismissal, discrimination, equal pay, whistleblowing, harassment, unlawful deduction), drafts the ET1, and outputs a Tribunal-Procedure-Rules-compliant indexed bundle — all before the 3-month claim deadline runs out. Sold to claimants for ~£49–£199 per case, riding a triple regulatory tailwind: the Employment Rights Act 2025, Acas Early Conciliation extending to 12 weeks (Dec 2025), and the ET time-limit extension to 6 months (Oct 2026). The only well-funded incumbent (Valla.uk, $3.3M raised) leads on coaching/case-strategy; this idea wedges in below them on pure document automation and SAR generation, where Valla currently sells templates à la carte.
The Story
Meet the user
Aisha was a senior project coordinator at a Manchester logistics firm until last November, when she was made redundant three weeks after returning from maternity leave. The "redundancy" hit only her role; her two male colleagues at the same level were redeployed. She knows it's pregnancy-and-maternity discrimination — her line manager said as much over a curry leaving-do, off the cuff. But proving it means dragging four years of emails, two Slack workspaces, a Teams channel, and her old WhatsApp work group into a single chronological story, drafting an ET1 with citations, sending Subject Access Requests to her employer, the parent group, the occupational-health provider she saw in October, and the payroll outsourcer — all before 6 February. She rings two solicitors. The first quotes £4,000 + VAT for "case preparation only." The second offers no-win-no-fee but takes 25% of any settlement whether or not the case ever reaches a hearing. Her union rep has a 6-week waiting list. The Free Representation Unit takes ~300 cases a year nationally and she's number 412 on their pre-screen.
A friend in her NCT WhatsApp sends her a link. She uploads her email export, drags in the Slack archive, takes phone photos of the WhatsApp thread. Forty minutes later she has: a colour-coded timeline of 174 events tagged by claim type, four ICO-compliant SAR letters auto-addressed to the right legal entities (the AI looked them up on Companies House), a draft ET1 with paragraph-level citations to her own evidence, and a deadline tracker that turns red 14 days before the 6 February cliff. She pays £99. By the next evening, her four SARs are in the post and her ET1 draft is sitting with a Valla coach for a £149 review. Total spend: £248. Her solicitor friend says it's the cleanest claim file he's seen from a self-represented claimant in years.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.6/10
~50k single ET claims/year (highest since 2012/13, +54% YoY in Q3 25/26), gov projects +17% rise from ERA 2025 (+6,900 ET cases). DSAR 2,900/mo, ET1 2,400/mo, Acas EC 5,400/mo (8,100 in March 2026). Big underserved DIY/litigant-in-person segment.
Solicitor fees £2k–£35k. No-win-no-fee solicitors take ~25% even when cases settle without a hearing (80%+ of them do). FRU caps at ~300 cases/year. The 3-month deadline is unforgiving.
Standard Next.js + Postgres + LLM stack. Email/IMAP ingestion, Slack/Teams export parsing, OCR for screenshots, PDF bundle generation, Companies House API for SAR addressing. ~4–6 weeks for solo MVP.
Triple regulatory tailwind: ERA 2025 day-one rights from April 2026, Acas EC extended to 12 weeks (Dec 2025), ET time-limit extending 3→6 months (Oct 2026), unfair-dismissal qualifying period 2yr→6mo (Jan 2027). Tribunal backlog already 523k cases.
Underlying need (workplace dispute) is permanent. Regulatory window has a 12–24 month peak then plateaus into evergreen demand. Risk: Valla absorbs SAR/timeline features into its core platform within 18 months.
Solo-buildable but the business isn't trivial — high-stakes legal-adjacent products need brand trust, regulatory care, evidence integrity, and content marketing into a low-trust market.
Strongest
Timing
Three statutory changes converging in a 12-month window create a once-a-decade tailwind.
Watch out
Effort to Build
The technical build is small, but the brand-trust and regulatory-positioning lift is real and underestimable. Get the disclaimer language and the "tool, not advice" framing wrong and the ICO or SRA could push back.
Pain Point
The problem
“I'm pretty sure I was constructively dismissed but the deadline is 4 weeks away, my solicitor wants £3,500 just to draft the ET1, and I have to explain four years of emails to her at £290/hour. Is there any tool that just lets me dump the evidence and have it sorted out for me?”
— Paraphrased from typical r/LegalAdviceUK and MoneySavingExpert employment-tribunal threads
Bringing an Employment Tribunal claim in the UK in 2026 is brutal for the claimant. Three months less one day from the dismissal/event to file (extending to six months from October 2026 — but for most current claimants the 3-month rule still applies). Miss it and the claim is dead.
Acas Early Conciliation is mandatory — and from December 2025 it's been extended from 6 to 12 weeks, eating two-thirds of the original window before the claimant can even file. SAR window is one calendar month. Get the SAR wrong and either the employer slow-rolls it within technical compliance, or you re-issue and burn another month off your runway.
Solicitors are unaffordable for most. Simple cases £2,000–£5,000+VAT through to hearing; complex cases £20,000–£30,000+VAT. Hourly rates £230–£350+VAT. No-win-no-fee has a sting in the tail: over 80% of ET cases settle before final hearing; CFA/DBA solicitors still take up to 25% of the settlement.
Free help is rationed. FRU takes ~300 cases/year nationwide. Citizens Advice gives signposting only. Equality Advisory Support Service is signposting only. Unions are members-only and have waitlists.
Evidence is scattered. Modern work happens across email, Slack/Teams, WhatsApp, Zoom transcripts, internal HR portals — and the average claimant has none of this in a tribunal-bundle-compliant format. The result: the people most wronged at work are the ones least equipped to navigate the system.
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