From Sunday 6 April 2014 anyone wanting to raise an employment tribunal claim will be directed to Acas first to try early conciliation. ere are the key things to be aware of:

• While early conciliation will be launched on 6 April, it will only be from 6 May that the scheme becomes mandatory for most claims and the tribunals will reject an ET1 if the Claimant hasn’t contacted Acas first.

• Parties do not need to actively engage in conciliation. The only obligations are for the Claimant to contact Acas initially and then for Acas to try to conciliate the dispute.

• Early conciliation is free. It all takes place before the Claimant needs to pay a fee to lodge their claim.

• Claimants don’t need to tell Acas what type of claim they are thinking of raising, just that they have a potential claim against an employer.

• You should consider putting in place a process or training to make sure employees know how to deal with Acas if they contact your business about early conciliation to ensure that queries are directed to the correct department.

• From the moment the Claimant contacts Acas, the time limits for raising a claim (normally 3 months) will be frozen to allow for conciliation to take place. This is known as “Stop the Clock”.

• Conciliation will normally last one month. The period can be extended to 6 weeks if it looks like a settlement might be reached, or stopped early if settlement does not seem likely.

• Parties can agree to settle the claim through Acas using a COT3 agreement just as you do now. As you won’t have the ET1 setting out the legal claims, be careful to ensure that all the relevant claims are settled in the COT3. If in doubt, take legal advice on this to minimise the risk of a claim being pursued after you think a full and final settlement has been reached.

• If early conciliation ends without a settlement, Acas will give the Claimant a certificate which they need in order to lodge their ET1. The time limit for lodging the claim will have been extended by the Stop the Clock period of conciliation. If the Claimant first contacted Acas to start early conciliation when they had less than one month left within which to lodge their claim, they will be given one full month after the issue of the certificate to lodge their claim.