Roll on Friday report
A law graduate has been banned from complaining to the Employment Tribunal about job applications after he sued employers 42 times for not hiring him.
Zakir Khan brought claims against Mills & Reeve, Bevan Brittan, Weightmans, Shoosmiths, four against Irwin Mitchell, more against various government departments, and 12 against the SRA.
His arc of failure was similar in each case. After applying for a job stating that he had a law degree and LLM in commercial law, he sued under the Equality Act 2010 once he was rejected.
Khan would claim the prospective employer had failed to make reasonable adjustments to its recruitment process to accommodate his disabilities – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, depression, anxiety, and Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder.
Sometimes the graduate didn’t get as far as applying, and would sue on the basis that the application process was too discriminatory for him to even begin it.
The list of adjustments he said employers should have made was excellent and included:
- allowing him to skip assessments;
- lowering the minimum competency threshold for the job;
- ignoring grammatical errors in his application;
- awarding him higher marks;
- not imposing a word limit on his application;
- allowing him to submit follow-up correspondence; and
- “perhaps most optimistically”, providing him with an LPC scholarship.
His success rate at the Employment Tribunal was “poor”, with no evidence that any of the 42 claims succeeded. Many were struck out for being “totally without merit”.
The pinnacle of Khan’s litigation success saw two firms give him “nuisance value” payments of £700 and £1000 to settle.
The SRA and five government departments came together and applied for a Civil Restraint Order to staunch Khan’s flow of litigation.
Acting for himself, Khan applied to have the CRO application struck out and also made a counter-claim to overturn all the decisions of the Employment Tribunal*.
His retaliatory lawsuit complained that one of the Employment Judges would “clasp his head at times” and made “expressions [which] were nerve inducing”.
DIsmissing both of Khan’s applications, Judge Emma Kelly said in her judgment they were “wholly misconceived”, “legally incoherent”, and “hopelessly vague”.
“He did, however, tell the court he had studied law a long time ago and couldn’t remember much of it”, she said.
Khan argued that a restraint order was unnecessary as he was now happily employed at the Office of the Public Guardian. But he rather undermined any comfort that gave by promising to fight the claims already in motion “until the very end”.
Khan gave the judge a fair idea of what employers had experienced, sending the court an “inordinate” numbers of emails.
The graduate’s voluminous correspondence across his many claims proved there was a significant risk he would continue to bring meritless claims.
“I may have, metaphorically, half the brain to stand a chance given my situation health-wise, but I will continue till I have nothing left. I don’t fear the consequences thereof…”, he wrote in one email.
For reasons the judge said were “unclear”, Khan also gave the court internal emails from his current job which indicated that he “may find himself again looking for new employment”.
The emails showed that while he was still on probation, Khan had made errors, requested time off for Ramadan and a pilgrimage, asked for a reduced caseload, was warned for leaving work without permission, and told his employer he was having “a meltdown and hitting breaking point”.
Given his “persistent” meritless claims and the “significant risk” of more to come, the court imposed an order preventing Khan from either issuing new claims in the Employment Tribunal arising from the job application process, or making appeals. So far as ROF is aware, he’s not on LawyerUp.
*He also claimed damages. What for? Here’s a non-exhaustive list: injury to feelings, victimisation, loss of amenity, psychiatric injury, “the injudiciousness of the judges”, the SRA’s “abuse of process” in applying for the restraint order, plus a “(new) enhanced award for psychiatric harm”.
