Okay, thank you for the entire life story of your problem employee and your entire family. As you said, and as you know, very little of this is relevent. Let's see if we can pick out a few relevent facts and move forward here.
In the hearing, your representative and your brother in law will be sworn in. Neither of you, incidentally, will be able to bring in a whole family full of people to "help present" your case. If you have someone who is a witness, which would certainly be a good idea, they will be asked to sit outside or stay off the telephone line until their turn to speak. A letter from someone you worked with many montho or years ago saying you were not abusive is not going to carry any weight. The person you spoke of who was there at the time of the quitting incident, and who had worked with you and your brother in law for a while before would be a nice addition to your evidence. His part will be very brief, I assure you. The hearing officer would like to get this resolved in a very reasonble amount of time, not two or three days, or even hours.
Since he is the one appealing, your brother in law will be asked to present his case. He will speak until he is finished without interruptions. (Unless he begins to run on with irrelevant information, at which point the officer will stop him.) He may lie. What a surprise! Your representative in the hearing will not be allowed to comment or question anything that the person says. He may want to take notes.
If you are getting this, I am suggesting that your husband may need to be the one who represents your company. I don't care if you are the chief cook and bottlewasher and person who does all the paperwork, this is my reason. Women like yourself (i'm guilty too!) tend to talk too much, throw in too many extraneous comments, give too much information, and we have already established that you have a tendency to do this. Its a known fact that the less said, just the facts ma'am are the best way to win a hearing of this type. You don't want to go in and piss off the hearing officer by throwing in so much stuff that they can't get a fix on the relevant case at hand and even worse, may have to tell you to shut up.
What your brother in law is going to try to claim is that he was off work due to an injury, and when he came back, you all mistreated him in an effort to get rid of him because he was "injured." It is actually in your favor that he is claiming you abused and mis-used him even before his injury. The question that arises, of course, is why did he not move on and find another job, why did he put up with this unbearable abuse all this time? You don't say it, you just let the hearing officer notice it. It might be a good question to ask in the Q&A section of the hearing, we'll talk more about that later.
THe only information you need to present is: how long the employee worked for you. How many records of disciplinary action you had against him, how you have retained him for a long time even though his work was unsatisfactory. How you tried, in many ways, on many occasions, to get him to improve his performance because you did not want to get rid of him. If you don't have, and I'm pretty sure you don't have, signed disciplinary statements where he was told that his job was unsatisfactory or that he was doing something wrong which could result in his being terminated, try to sit down with a calendar and create an informal records of how many times, just in the last few months, that your husband, his supervisor, has spoken to him and explained to him that his work was not satisfactory and that he needed to change his behavior.
Try to keep those times limited to his work performance if possible. There is also the side problem of attendance, the side problem of attitude, the side problem that you were going to begin drug testing and were quite sure he was going to fail drug tests. But don't cloud up the water with hundreds of side issues. This is the "kitchen sink" argument, and sometimes it makes it harder to show that you were NOT harrassing the poor guy in a hostile way in an effort to get rid of him.
What the adjudicator will be looking for is not the entertaining life story of a troubled relationship, but "here is a client who says he was forced to quit a job based on how badly he was treated. Okay, does he have any proof of this? Do these people appear to have been mistreating this person with the intention of getting rid of him?" And they'd like to do it quickly, with as little probing as possible.
After the claimant speaks, your side will have their time to present your case.
Describe briefly the problems you had with him in the last 6 months. Don't go back through recorded history since they were born, okay? We do not give a rats's patooty whether or not he calls another woman mommy or that he caused a car wreck that hurt your husband. You may mention briefly that he has told people he felt he was about to get a big settlement soon and would no longer need to work. You may mention briefly that you are aware he has a new girlfriend and that he had been telling people on the worksite that he wanted to move to another state with her. (This is hearsay, and probably wouldn't be allowed in a regular court room, but it may slide by in an unemployment hearing.) What you're establishing is that your former employee wanted to stop working for you for many reasons, not that you were harrassing him and making the job impossible for him.
Describe what occurred on the day he quit, downplaying the physical confrontation and the family history/old laundry that may have gotten washed. Make it very plain that he was not fired, that he was the one who drove the whole process of his leaving. Be brief, be factual, and emphasize that you went above and beyond the ordinary in trying to retain this employee and help him improve his performance of the job you had given him. But don't wave the flag and present yourselves as smarmy saints who were putting up with this ne'er do well family member in spite of his obvious defectiveness, and we're just good old tax payin' citizens, blah blah blah. Just be factual.
At this point, the witness would also be asked exactly what he saw on the day of the quitting, what was said to the employee and how he behaved.
Then first the claimant and then your side will be asked if they have any questions for the other party. If something is glaringly false in his testimony, you may want to ask a question about that or to use this time to clarify something he said. Remember, either asking or answering, be brief. The hearing officer may want to ask a few questions of either of you. Listen carefully to their questions and answer briefly and factually.
The hearing will end and you will be notified in a short time how the decision is going to go. Sometimes, appeals go in favor of the claimant, sometimes they go in favor of the employer. It appears that in the first decision, the claimant was not determined to have had a valid misconduct reason to quit the job. We hope that he cannot produce fresh and meaningful evidence in the hearing that he had such a reason. You just go in and tell what happened from your point of view and hope for the best. I can't and no one here can provide you with complete assurance that the hearing will go one way or another.
One additional thing I would like to caution you about. DO NOT try to write down everything and then enter this document into the hearing. It is not called a "writing" it is a HEARING. Do not take a bunch of paperwork, including a letter or a canned speech into the hearing and try to read it off. A hearing is a much more fluid piece of action. DO NOT quote unemployment law to the hearing officer. Do not think you are Perry Mason and can holler out "I Object! Irrelevant!" in some dramatic fashion. The hearing officer already knows all the unemployment law they need to know. They will ask questions if they need to hear certain specifics.