Some workplace disputes fizzle out quietly with a settlement nobody hears about. This one isn’t shaping up to be one of them. According to The Independent, the case could end up delivering the largest payout a British employment tribunal has ever handed down. At the centre of it is Shannon Burns, a former vice-president of engineering at the tech company Gitpod, who’s seeking a staggering Rs 964 crore in compensation after being dismissed from her role, a dismissal that followed a boozy company team-building trip where she ended up spending the night asleep in a hotel sauna.
What actually happened in Austria
The whole saga began in April 2023, during a team-building event held in Lofer, Austria. Burns, who has ADHD, had been drinking with colleagues during the trip, and at some point that night, found herself locked out of her hotel room after misplacing her key. Rather than waking anyone up or sorting the issue out through the hotel, she ended up spending the night sleeping in the sauna instead. It’s the kind of mishap that could easily happen to anyone on a work trip that got a little too relaxed, but for Burns, it ended up carrying far bigger consequences.
A dismissal that raised eyebrows
Following the trip, Gitpod’s CEO, Johannes Landgraf, reportedly expressed concern over what he described as a lack of professional accountability on Burns’s part. That concern translated into action fairly quickly, and Burns was dismissed from her position at the company in June 2023, just a couple of months after the Austria trip.
The tribunal sided with her
Fast forward to 2025, and the Birmingham Employment Tribunal delivered a ruling that shifted the entire narrative around her dismissal. The tribunal found that Burns had actually been dismissed as a direct result of her disability, and she went on to win her disability discrimination case against the company. That win is what’s now paving the way for her enormous compensation claim, based largely on calculations tied to her projected future earnings had she remained in her role.
Why the number is so eye-wateringly high
Gitpod, unsurprisingly, pushed back hard against the scale of the claim. The company applied to have Burns’s claim capped at a far smaller figure, around Rs 12.68 crore, and asked the tribunal to require a deposit of roughly Rs 1.27 lakh, arguing that anything beyond that reduced figure had little realistic chance of succeeding. The company went as far as calling her Rs 964 crore valuation “extraordinary” and dismissed the underlying calculations as “palpable nonsense.“
The judge wasn’t convinced by that argument either
Employment Judge Rachel Wedderspoon ultimately rejected Gitpod’s application to limit the claim. In her ruling, she pointed out that Burns had an exceptionally high pay history, and that her overall claim factored in both lost salary and lost equity, not just a straightforward salary calculation. That equity piece turned out to be a significant part of the story.
The equity stake that changes everything
According to the tribunal, Burns held a 0.85 per cent stake in Gitpod, and Judge Wedderspoon noted that this stake could realistically be worth around Rs 32.61 crore at current valuation. More strikingly, the judge suggested that figure could balloon to as much as Rs 267.13 crore within four years, specifically if Gitpod were to be acquired by OpenAI for a reported Rs 3,836.76 crore, a scenario the tribunal apparently considered plausible enough to factor into its reasoning.
Why the tribunal let the claim proceed
While the tribunal openly acknowledged that the amount being claimed was highly unusual, it stopped short of concluding that Burns’s valuation had no reasonable chance of holding up, at least not without proper expert evidence being presented first. That distinction is really what’s kept her larger claim alive rather than getting slashed down to the smaller figure Gitpod had pushed for.
More than just lost earnings
Beyond the core compensation for lost salary and equity, Burns is also pursuing additional damages for injury to her feelings, along with what’s known as an ACAS uplift, an additional amount tribunals can award when an employer is found to have failed to follow proper workplace procedures. Since leaving the tech industry altogether following her dismissal, Burns has reportedly moved in a completely different direction professionally, retraining to become a therapist.
A case that’s far from over
Whether Burns actually ends up walking away with anything close to Rs 964 crore remains to be seen, since the final compensation figure will likely depend heavily on further evidence, particularly around how realistically her equity stake might have appreciated had she stayed at the company. But for now, the sheer scale of the claim alone has been enough to turn what started as an awkward night in a hotel sauna into one of the most closely watched employment disputes in recent UK tribunal history.
