Shannon Burns won a discrimination case against Gitpod last year after the company dismissed her following a work trip to Austria. She is now pursuing what could become the largest employment tribunal award in British legal history.

The largest known award to date is £4.58 million.

Ms Burns was earning £220,000 a year when she was dismissed three years ago, alongside an annual £78,000 bonus. She told the tribunal that she developed PTSD following her dismissal and had permanently left the technology industry.

She said her claim was based on “forensic” calculations of what she could have earned had she continued her career.

Gitpod sought to limit the potential damages to £1 million, but a tribunal in Birmingham rejected the application. Ms Burns’s lawyers had described the company’s application as “oppressive”.

The tribunal has also ordered Gitpod to disclose the value of its recent sale to OpenAI. Ms Burns holds shares in the company reportedly worth £2.6 million, with their value potentially rising to £21 million after four years.

Ms Burns, an American described as a “trailblazer”, had previously worked for technology companies including Slack and Lyft before being recruited by Gitpod in 2022.

A year later, she travelled to a work event in Austria and drank with senior colleagues. After forgetting her room key, she was unable to wake her roommate and slept in a sauna. Ms Burns also has ADHD.

Johannes Landgraf, Gitpod’s chief executive, subsequently raised concerns about her “lack of professional accountability”. Ms Burns was dismissed later that year.

She told the tribunal that male colleagues had also been drunk at the event, “but I was the only one who was dismissed”.

The tribunal found that Ms Burns’s disabilities had contributed to her dismissal and that she had therefore been discriminated against. Judge Rachel Wedderspoon said her ADHD had contributed to a “great deal of forgetfulness”, including losing her room key.

In rejecting Gitpod’s application, the judge said Ms Burns had “an exceptionally high pay history”.

She acknowledged that the damages sought were “highly unusual and the sort of award that may be more commonplace awarded in the US jurisdiction”, but said it was too early to conclude that Ms Burns’s valuation “has little reasonable prospect of success”.

Ms Burns’s lawyer, Tara Grossman, said her client had “already earned well over a £1 million in junior roles, and when she joined Gitpod she was given a £220,000 annual salary and told her shares could be worth anywhere from $1.06 million to $27.85 million. This was from one job in tech over a four-year period”.

Ms Grossman said Ms Burns was “now in a position where she can never work in tech again and is retraining to be a therapist with nowhere near the same earning potential”.

A further hearing will determine damages, subject to Gitpod’s appeal against the original tribunal ruling.