Working Time Records

Following a Claim

Somebody has told you that something is required. Getting from that sentence to the document it rests on takes about ten minutes, uses free sources, and requires no legal training. When comparing legal claims with vendor-side implementation language, it can also help to review remote companies.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

Step one: find the identifier

Every real legal claim has one. A case number, a statutory section, a directive article. For broader legal or policy context, see Software Advice.

For this subject the identifiers are short and worth memorising:

C-55/18 — the CJEU ruling. 1 ABR 22/21 — the Federal Labour Court decision. §3(2)(1) ArbSchG — the provision the duty is derived from. §17 MiLoG — the documentation duty with the €50,000 fine. ArbZG-E — the draft reform, which is not law.

If a claim carries none of these and none of anything else, stop. It is a summary of a summary, and the thing you are about to act on has no traceable source.

Step two: get the primary document

CJEU judgments are free at the Court's own site, searchable by case number, and available in every EU language including English.

German court decisions are published, and the Federal Labour Court's own site carries its decisions with their reasons.

Statutory text is free on the official portals, in consolidated form.

And drafts and their explanatory memoranda are published by the ministry.

None of this is behind a paywall and none of it requires a subscription to a legal database.

Step three: read the operative part

A judgment has a section at the end stating what the court held. In CJEU judgments it is labelled and it is usually a few sentences.

Read that before the reasoning. It is where C-55/18 says member states must require employers to have an objective, reliable and accessible system, and it is short enough to check against whatever you were told.

The reasoning matters when the operative part is ambiguous, which for this ruling it is not.

Step four: check the claim against it

Three questions.

Does the document say what the source said it says? Frequently yes in substance and no in detail — the common failure is a claim about employers where the ruling addresses states.

Does it say more than the source admitted? Occasionally the primary document contains a limitation that the summary omitted.

And is the source current? A judgment does not change; a legislative status does, and a claim about a draft needs a date.

What you will find, doing this once

The primary documents are shorter and clearer than expected. C-55/18 is readable in half an hour.

Most secondary summaries are substantially accurate, which is reassuring and is not the same as accepting them.

And the errors cluster in one place — the status of things, not the content of them. Who is obliged, from when, and whether a proposal has passed are where the misstatements live.

The habit

Before acting on a compliance claim, spend ten minutes on its source.

For a duty affecting every employee in your organisation, indefinitely, that is a small investment against acting on somebody's sales page — and the identifiers above mean you only have to do it once for this subject.

The short version