A case study in what happens when the wrong person takes the minutes
What happened
A person at a large organisation was asked to take minutes at a disciplinary meeting. They worked in a different department to the employee being investigated, so on paper it looked like a sensible choice. No one questioned it.
What nobody asked was whether they actually knew the person. Whether they had heard the office talk about the incident. Whether they had already formed a view on what happened.
They had. On all counts.
They had spoken to the employee concerned before the meeting. They had been part of the office conversations, the speculation, the bits nobody should have been discussing at all. They did not disclose any of it, because they were never asked, and they assumed it would be fine.
It was not fine.
What went wrong
The notes came back incomplete and subjective. They failed to accurately record who said what, which is the one thing a disciplinary record absolutely has to do. When the matter progressed, the minutes could not be relied on at tribunal.
The minute taker had struggled to separate fact from opinion, and opinion from hearsay. Things they had heard around the office before the meeting found their way into the record as though they were evidence. Damaging, unsubstantiated gossip, written down as fact.
There was also a data protection breach. Nobody had briefed them on the rules around handling sensitive personal information in a formal process, so information that should have been tightly controlled was not. Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, records relating to disciplinary matters contain personal data, and often special category data. Handling them carelessly is not an administrative slip. It is a breach.
None of this was malicious. The minute taker was not dishonest and did not set out to skew anything. The record was simply compromised from the start, because the person creating it should never have been in the room.
Why the minutes matter more than people think
Minutes are not an administrative courtesy. In a governance context they are a legal record.
The Companies Act 2006 requires companies to keep minutes of directors’ meetings (section 248) and records of general meetings (section 355), and to retain them for ten years. Those minutes are the formal evidence of what was decided, by whom, and with what authority. Courts and regulators treat them as exactly that.
In an HR context, the stakes are just as real. Disciplinary and grievance meetings must follow strict procedures. The ACAS Code of Practice sets out how investigations and hearings should be conducted, and employees have a statutory right to be accompanied at disciplinary and grievance hearings under the Employment Relations Act 1999. Adjournments need recording. Who was present needs recording. Who said what needs recording, accurately and without interpretation.
Miss those details and you have not just produced bad paperwork. You have undermined the fairness of the entire process. If the outcome is challenged, a tribunal will not start with what was decided. It will start with how the record was created. Who took the minutes? What was their connection to the people involved? Could they have had a bias in how they recorded what was said?
If the answer is yes, the record starts to fall apart, and the process with it.
The questions nobody asked
In this case, the whole problem could have been avoided with a few questions before the meeting started:
Do you know the employee concerned, in any capacity?
Have you heard anything about this incident before today?
Have you been involved in any conversations about it?
Do you understand what can and cannot go into a formal record, and the data protection rules that apply?
“Works in a different department” answers none of these. In most organisations, particularly smaller ones, departments talk to each other. Acquaintance, familiarity and office gossip do not respect the org chart.
What an independent minute taker changes
An independent minute taker has no connection to the people involved, no prior knowledge of the incident, and no stake in the outcome. They are trained to record what is actually said, to distinguish fact from opinion and hearsay, to note adjournments and procedural steps, and to handle sensitive personal data properly.
They also cannot be accused of bias afterwards, which protects everyone. The employer, the employee, and the process itself.
That is why organisations bring us in for disciplinary hearings, grievance panels and governance meetings. Our minute takers are experienced, trained and impartial. They were not in the room before the meeting, and they have no view on how it should end. They just record what happened.
Which, when the record is later examined by a solicitor or a tribunal, turns out to be the thing that matters most.
Sam Johnstone Director, S.A.M. Ltd 16 July 2026
