BrewDog is back in the headlines after its sale to Tilray Brands for £33 million, a deal that preserved 733 jobs but led to 38 bar closures and 484 redundancies, while leaving more than 200,000 crowd investors facing losses.

For a business that built its public identity on anti-corporate branding, its employment tribunal record offers a narrower legal lens: where allegations are tested, claims can fail, and conduct is assessed against statutory duties.

Tribunal record in numbers

On the material reviewed for this analysis, BrewDog’s published tribunal record includes eight judgments between July 2017 and June 2024 across BrewDog group entities.

Those outcomes include one substantive finding of unlawful discrimination, two merits dismissals, four withdrawals dismissed under Rule 52, and one strike-out under Rule 37 for non-compliance with tribunal orders.

That mix matters. A raw case count can look severe in isolation, but most supplied judgments are short-form outcomes without full reasons and most did not end in liability findings.

Key cases

The central merits decision in the published record is Ross v Brewdog Plc, a disability discrimination case heard in Aberdeen in 2018. The tribunal majority held BrewDog had failed to make reasonable adjustments and had treated the claimant unfavourably because of something arising from disability, awarding £12,052.45 compensation.

The judgment also dismissed the direct discrimination claim, and one panel member dissented on reasonable adjustments. The case therefore turned on contested balancing of health-and-safety concerns and equality duties, not a simple one-sided factual finding.

In Ingram v Brewdog Bars Limited (November 2019), an unfair dismissal complaint was dismissed. However, written reasons were not included in the file, so the outcome cannot credibly support broad cultural conclusions by itself.

What this tells us about the company

The published judgments reviewed here do not establish a broad pattern of repeated tribunal losses. On these materials, only one case resulted in a clear claimant merits win and the remainder are mixed outcomes.

But that one substantive judgment is significant. The tribunal majority criticised BrewDog’s approach to reasonable adjustments, process and legal awareness in a legally sensitive workplace issue involving disability and dismissal.

A cautious inference from that judgment is that, at least in that period and dispute, internal employment-law process and implementation did not match the standards expected of an employer of BrewDog’s scale.

What the record cannot tell us

Tribunal judgments are only one part of the picture. Some disputes settle confidentially, some are never filed, and not every claim that is filed proves wrongdoing.

Several outcomes in this record are short procedural judgments that do not disclose underlying causes of action in detail. The record therefore supports careful, bounded conclusions rather than sweeping claims about every site, manager or period.

What it can show is concrete legal outcome: a limited but meaningful public record, including one important disability discrimination loss that remains the key merits finding in the material reviewed.

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Ranking Over Time Analysis

Employment tribunals deal with workplace disputes between employees and employers across the UK. Using publicly available tribunal decisions published by HM Courts and Tribunals Service, we analysed which employers appear most frequently as respondents and how those rankings change over time.

Instead of ranking employers once, this view tracks cumulative annual movement. That reveals a stronger story: some employers remain consistently high, while others jump during litigation waves driven by related group claims.

What The League Table Shows

The chart tracks relative ranking from 2017 to 2025, based on cumulative published tribunal decisions. Each line is one employer, and vertical position is rank for that year.

• Some employers stay near the top year after year.

• Some move gradually as disputes accumulate.

• Some jump sharply when related claims are decided in clusters.

Royal Mail: Consistent Top Respondent

Royal Mail remains the highest-ranking respondent in this period. Its case mix includes unfair dismissal, disability discrimination, wage and working-time disputes, and breach-of-contract claims.

A noticeable concentration appears around 2019 in the underlying data. Because this chart is cumulative, Royal Mail stays top even when other employers experience temporary spikes.

Scottish Local Authorities: Litigation Waves

Glasgow City Council and North Lanarkshire Council show pronounced ranking shifts associated with equal-pay litigation patterns. Equal-pay disputes can involve large groups of employees and create decision clusters over short windows.

These jumps are often timing effects from related cases reaching decision stage together, not always sudden new dispute creation in a single year.

Retail, Government, and Contractor Patterns

Tesco and ASDA show more stable mid-to-upper ranking presence with mixed claim types across dismissal, discrimination, and pay/time issues. Government respondents such as the Department for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Justice also appear consistently with broad dispute mixes.

DHL and Mitie show steady lower-rank activity, typically linked to operational workforce disputes including wage, working-time, contractual, and process-related dismissal issues.

Why Large Employers Appear Frequently

Large organisations are more likely to appear repeatedly because workforce size and organisational complexity increase the probability of disputes. Group litigation can amplify this effect by producing large numbers of related cases.

• Workforce size: more employees generally means more dispute exposure.

• Complex structures: multiple management layers can increase process inconsistency risk.

• Group litigation: equal-pay and similar claims can generate large case waves.

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Methodology

This analysis uses publicly available tribunal decisions published by HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Rankings reflect respondent frequency in published decision data and should be treated as indicative patterns rather than definitive totals of all claims filed.