Labour Court
Hears industrial and employment disputes under provincial labour law.
The forum
Labour Courts hear disputes between workers and employers under the provinces' labour legislation, including grievance and dismissal matters. They sit across the industrial cities. Grievance notices, dismissal and reinstatement, and disputes referred by a works council all land here, and an appeal generally lies to the provincial labour appellate forum.
Where it sits
The principal seat is Karachi. It also sits at Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sheikhupura, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Peshawar, Mardan, Quetta, Hyderabad, Sukkur and Larkana. A date given at one is not a date at another, which is why the bench belongs in the record with the date.
What a firm has to track
Labour matters arrive in groups: several workers, the same employer, the same date. A diary that lists each separately buries the fact that one person can attend all of them, and a firm that cannot see that sends three. The grouping matters more than it sounds. Twenty workers dismissed together are twenty matters, one employer and usually one date — so a firm needs a list that shows them together and lets one person cover them, rather than twenty rows that look like twenty mornings.
The date the court gives is a fact. Whoever is standing there records it in CaseMate before they leave the building, and the office acknowledges it — it does not wait to be approved.
The firm decides who goes to the next hearing, against the hearing itself. A matter at a distant bench is a travel arrangement, not a line in a list.
Every previous date, its outcome and the note taken at the time — so a partner can be answered without opening the file.
A hearing in the past with nothing recorded against it is the one thing a diary must never hide. CaseMate lists them separately.
Start with today's list.
Set your firm up in a couple of minutes, enter the cases you are running this week, and let your associates report from court.