I have an employment problem and am being forced out of my job on a trumped up disciplinary charge. I have accepted that I can't stay working for my current employers and I intend to take them to an employment tribunal when they dismiss me.
I do not have a union and I do not have any colleagues who will come into the disciplinary/grievance hearings with me to act as witnesses. So I asked my employer if they would mind if I recorded these hearings on a voice recorder. They said no I could not. So I did it anyway without them knowing because I simply had no other means by which I could prove their lies.
I now have a number of covert recordings of my line managers telling me things during these hearings that they later lied about. This is evidence of their dishonesty and that they did not follow a fair procedure that I intend to rely upon in court.
At some point I am going to have to disclose these recordings to my employer if I wish to use them at a tribunal. I just don't know when to disclose.
I have spoken to two solicitors who have both given me completely different advice.
The first said that my dismissal may not be as inevitable as I think and I should wait until they actually do it because if I disclose the recordings beforehand the recordings could be used as a legitimate reason for dismissal and play into their hands. She said that only after my dismissal should I let them know about the recordings just prior to the employment tribunal. At this stage the employer will believe that I have no way of proving their lies but the recordings will muddy the waters and they'll realise that I can prove their lies and give them the incentive to settle.
The second solicitor says that I should disclose the recordings prior to the final hearing/dismissal. So the dismissing manager can't claim at a later date that had they known about the lies my line managers told earlier in the process I would not have been dismissed. It may also provide them with an early incentive to settle.
Either way there are risks involved and there's no way of knowing what will happen but I was curious if anyone else had been through something like this or had any opinions on the matter. I've done a search here and I see there are a few threads on the subject of covert recordings but nothing really on when best to disclose them.