It is open season on employment tribunals and the ‘parasitical creatures’ (aka employment lawyers) that argue their clients’ cases before them. Maybe it is time that the profession got its public relations act together and took on its detractors at their own game.

It has been a rocky start to the year for employment rights. On Tuesday 4 January, charity human resources director Helen Giles wrote in The Times that employment tribunals are ‘legalised extortion’. It costs nothing for an employee to ‘cook up a claim’, she wrote, and the system is ‘heavily loaded’ against the employer. Employment lawyers with the commercial nous to advertise their services on the internet are ‘parasitical creatures’, she added, before noting that some small business owners ‘prefer to employ illegal immigrants, cash in hand’ rather than risk legitimate employees exploiting ‘their limitless rights’.

Bright and early on Wednesday 5 January the Confederation of British Industry took its turn at trashing employment tribunals. The CBI director general John Cridland told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the present system of tribunals was not fit for purpose and that ‘everybody other than the lawyers lose’. Conditional fee agreements are the villain of the piece because they allow litigants to bring claims with little substance, knowing that they will not risk a huge costs bill.

And so to Thursday 6 January, when the ever-predictable Daily Mail added its voice to the onslaught, with Leo McKinstry writing about ‘greedy lawyers’ and ‘vexatious litigants’. Measures to protect employees from ‘rapacious’ employers were a good idea once upon a time, ‘but the pendulum has swung too far’ and the balance needs to be redressed.

This is all good – or at any rate, emotionally charged – polemic, but do the facts support it? Are employers really under siege from vexations employees? Are the tribunals, for that matter, snowed under with cases?

No, they are not. The number of individual claims has remained stable, ranging from 60,000 to 80,000 a year over the last decade. The total number of claims, which rose by 56% last year to 236,100, was mostly the result of multiple claims. Smaller businesses (and charities) are likely to remain unaffected, because it tends only to be big businesses that see multiple claims brought against them.

According to Richard Moorhead, law professor at Cardiff University, some other facts are also ‘questionable’. He wrote in his Lawyer Watch blog that the best estimate of the current level of contingency fees in employment tribunals is that they fund about 7% of all claims, which is a tiny proportion of the total, and certainly does not suggest that employers are being taken to the cleaners by employees who know how to play the 'no win, no fee' system.

That sounds definitive, except it is unlikely that the lawyer bashing is likely to stop soon. Employers have already won the public relations battle – people are ever ready to accept that it is the lawyers that are grasping and unethical, not the capitalist entrepreneurs that run businesses.

It is time for the lawyers to fight back. Most cases before employment tribunals are deserving, although some crooks and charlatans will always try it on. The solution is to start feeding the media with good news – there is plenty of it about – and not to be shy about the profession’s achievements.

After all, many lawyers entered the profession to protect the weak against the strong. Get out there and shout about it!