We analysed every published ADHD employment tribunal judgment in Britain. All 475 of them. Here is what actually decides these cases.

The ADHD Tribunal Files is the first complete analysis of every published ADHD employment tribunal judgment in Britain: 475 judgments, systematically analysed and independently verified, by Collette Easton. Not summaries, not keyword counts. Judgments.

The finding that matters most: outcomes track manager behaviour, not claimant condition. Where a judgment records clean management practice, employers won 4 cases in 5. Where nobody considered the disability before acting, claimants won nearly 3 in 4.

In late 2025 I set up a Google alert for "ADHD + tribunal". I wanted to understand whether the cases could help me show clients that workplace behaviour is rarely as straightforward as it looks to colleagues. Then the alerts changed: bigger employers, faster frequency, and finally a headline: tribunal cases linked to neurodiversity had almost doubled in five years.

A hypothesis formed, built partly on questions I had spent years asking about my own career. Could ADHD symptoms be misread as poor behaviour? Does that misreading trigger shame and rejection sensitivity, and does the shame produce the withdrawal and outbursts that then get managed as performance problems, with no one, at any stage, asking why a character flaw is being processed as a capability issue? Does the cycle end in resignation or dismissal, and then repeat at the next job? And underneath the published cases, how many people never claimed at all, just packed up their shame and left quietly, taking their knowledge with them?

I knew this cycle from the inside. Early in my career I went through a tribunal process myself; the stress of it stays with me still, and I would not understand the wiring underneath my own working life for another two decades. So we went to the only place where the cycle is documented under oath: every published judgment.

This research is what we found.

Fewer than the headlines say, growing faster than most employers think. The GOV.UK database returns 487 results for "ADHD" (480 unique cases, 2016–2026). We analysed all of them. Only 259 are really about ADHD; in the rest, the keyword belongs to a family member, a colleague, a quoted guidance document, or a condition mentioned in passing. Public counts based on keyword searches overstate the litigated volume roughly 2×.

The 259 core cases are still growing steeply: 12 in 2020 to 72 in 2025, six-fold in five years, with 43 already published for the first half of 2026. The claim window doubled to six months in 2025, and unfair dismissal becomes a day-one right from 2027.

Yes, you read the last line correctly: claimants lose most of these cases. Employers still pay to defend every one. The risk isn't losing. It's playing. And the tribunal record is the visible fraction: for every published judgment, our modelling suggests several hundred to a thousand ADHD-affected employees simply leave their jobs without ever claiming.

The Four Misreads are the four ways managers document ADHD symptoms as character flaws: detail errors as carelessness, undone tasks as laziness, emotional reactions as aggression, and lateness as disrespect.

They are the engine of this corpus. Almost none of the 259 cases involve slurs or deliberate discrimination. They involve a symptom, read as a character flaw, and then documented as one, at which point the write-up becomes the claimant's paper trail. The most litigated trait is not the one people guess: inattention and detail errors, read as carelessness, appear in 114 cases, ahead of lateness (23), emotional dysregulation (59) and task initiation read as laziness (63). Anxiety or depression appears alongside ADHD in 104 cases; in many, the ADHD surfaced only after years of being managed as a "stress problem".

The pattern closest to a rule: in every verified case where a formal process (a PIP, disciplinary or dismissal) simply carried on after an ADHD disclosure, the employer lost a connected claim. The starkest example is Ghiotto v Hawkwell House Hotel (2025): an employee disclosed self-identified, undiagnosed ADHD and was dismissed the next day, on the belief that no diagnosis meant no protection. Direct discrimination.

The employers who won did unglamorous things: they documented adjustment decisions and their reasons at the time; they read occupational health reports and acted on them; they trialled adjustments even when imperfect; they paused formal processes when a disability entered the picture. In the judges' words:

The defensive playbook and the retention playbook turn out to be the same document. The paper trail that wins tribunals is a by-product of managing people well.

Pause before sanctioning. If any formal process is live when someone discloses, stop it moving until adjustments have been assessed and the plan revisited. We call this the Disclosure Pause, and it is the single highest-value habit in the corpus. Beyond that: treat OH advice as instructions rather than paperwork, record every adjustment decision including the declines, and brief managers on the Four Misreads before they write the word "careless" in a performance note.