Sam Butler, Senior Associate at Horsfield Menzies, wins TCAP’s least coveted gong for a performance of such polished procedural nastiness that even the brochure probably asked to be taken down. This is the story of cost threats, public-hearing pressure, medical-record leverage, alleged litigation-history smearing, SRA complaints, the Rubin safety net, and the Miller stunt. The ginger is incidental. The cunt is procedural.
The Award Nobody Asked For
Every year, or at least whenever the evidence pile starts smelling like a solicitor’s desk after a panic meeting, TCAP reserves the right to recognise outstanding achievement in the field of being an absolute litigation goblin.
This year’s award goes to Sam Butler of Horsfield Menzies.
Not because he is ginger. Let’s be fair. Hair colour is a natural accident. The problem is not the hair. The problem is the conduct. The problem is the letter-writing. The problem is the hard little performance of professional aggression dressed up as case management. The problem is the way a disabled litigant’s medical distress, tribunal panic, public-hearing anxiety, and legal vulnerability were allegedly picked up, weighed, sharpened, and pressed back into his ribs.
So congratulations, Sam. TCAP hereby awards you Ginger Cunt of the Year.
Wear it in good health. Or, better yet, ask your client whether health should be admitted first. Fuck it, read it in poor health – cunt.
The Brochure Boy Meets The Bundle
Horsfield Menzies’ own profile presents Butler as the respectable face of employment litigation. Senior Associate. Professional. Polished. The kind of profile page that looks like it was written by someone who has never seen a disabled litigant in distress without wondering whether there is a tactical angle in it.
Then you place that soft-focus professional image beside the actual correspondence.
Suddenly the profile does not read like a credential. It reads like a disguise.
Because in Thompson v Cepac, Butler’s name appears on a run of correspondence that did not merely defend a client. It escalated. It smeared. It pushed. It framed. It threatened. It took medical records provided in a disability discrimination claim and, in my view, helped turn them into procedural ammunition.
This was not the usual solicitor bullshit of “we reserve our client’s position” and “please find attached”. This was litigation pressure with the bedside manner of a parking clamp.
Pressure Tactic One: Make It Public
The first major pressure tactic was the push to convert a preliminary hearing into a public one while medical vulnerability was squarely in play.
Let’s be blunt. A disabled claimant with severe anxiety had put his health before the Tribunal. The case involved disability. Medical records had been disclosed. The respondent’s side knew the anxiety point. They knew public exposure mattered. They knew the fear. And the response was not restraint. It was: shove it into public.
That is the move.
Not “how do we deal with this fairly?”. Not “what adjustments are proportionate?”. Not “is there a way to test matters without turning the claimant’s medical distress into a spectator event?”.
No. The move was public hearing, costs, medical records, strike out.
There was already a scheduled preliminary hearing before the medical disclosure became part of the battlefield. Then the files landed, and the cunt started pushing for public hearings. Those files showed a GAD score of 17. Not mild nerves. Not ordinary litigation discomfort. Severe anxiety, placed in the hands of the other side, followed by a push to make the process more exposed, more public, and more destabilising.
The whole thing had the vibe of a firm discovering that vulnerability exists and immediately trying to invoice against it.
The Rubin Safety Net
Rubin was not some random name floating in the CC swamp. He is the senior figure. He was named in the SRA complaint because this was not a rogue trainee sending a spicy email after too much Pret coffee. This was firm conduct. This was supervised conduct. This was the sort of conduct where silence becomes part of the machinery.
That matters.
Because the complaint was not “Sam said something mean and Lee cried”. The complaint named a pattern: misrepresentation of litigation history, disproportionate costs threats, gaslighting, misleading ET3 material, misuse of medical records, GP contact, public-hearing pressure, hostile labels like “bizarre” and “vexatious”, failure to engage on procedural matters, and Rubin’s oversight or involvement.
In plain English: the complaint said the firm was not just defending Cepac. It was helping create the pressure environment.
Rubin’s role is not some decorative footnote. If the senior partner is copied into the smoke and does not put the fire out, he does not get to pretend he only came for the sandwiches.
The Costs Shakedown
Then came Butler’s masterpiece: the costs threat letter.
The letter rejected settlement and told me Cepac’s position “will not change”. Fine. Clients posture. Solicitors posture. Everyone does their little theatre dance.
But then the numbers arrived.
£25,000 to £30,000.
Costs at the earliest opportunity. Costs if struck out. Costs if defended. Costs for non-attendance. Costs for the whole thing. Costs as a cudgel. Costs as a panic button. Costs as a way to make a disabled litigant look at his bank account, his health, his medical file, his tribunal deadline, and think: fuck, they are trying to bury me.
And then Butler reached for the phrase that wins him the gong: “quite frankly bizarre and utterly vexatious conduct”.
Lovely.
A claimant with anxiety and depression. A GP letter later confirming difficulty controlling emotions under stress. Medical records already part of the terrain. A disability discrimination case. And there is Sam, slapping “bizarre” onto the file like a man trying to make stigma sound procedural.
That word does work. It is not neutral. It is not clean. It does not merely say “unreasonable”. It paints the person as unstable, strange, irrational, unfit for serious treatment. In a disability case involving mental health, it is a fucking flare gun.
The Serial-Litigant Smear
Then there was the litigation-history stunt.
Butler’s correspondence presented me as someone who appeared to have brought claims in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. I corrected it. I said the 2020 claim was not me. I said the position was being misrepresented. I asked them to provide case numbers or withdraw.
The retreat was not clean. It became “appears”. It became “may have”. It became “could confirm”. It became that familiar legal trick where the mud is thrown at full speed, then gently repackaged as uncertainty once it has already splattered the wall.
And that matters, because not having the fucking bollocks to admit a mistake is a character thing.
This fucker is certainly a character.
Unfortunately, he appears to have none.
That is the bit the profile page cannot polish. Anyone can make a mistake. Anyone can search a judgment database, overreach, misread, misunderstand, or get too excited by a dirty little narrative that looks useful to a strike-out application. The test is what happens when the mistake is challenged. Do you correct it cleanly, or do you start wrapping it in fog and hoping the Tribunal remembers the smear but forgets the caveat?
Butler chose the fog.
He did not properly own the mess. He did not withdraw the stain with the same force used to throw it. He softened the wording, shifted into “appears”, and left the poisoned implication hanging there like a fart in a conference room.
That is not professionalism. That is cowardice in a suit.
This was narrative contamination. Take a disabled claimant, attach “serial litigator” to him, invite the Tribunal to see pattern before proof, then shrug when challenged.
That is the move.
Throw the mud loudly. Retreat quietly. Leave the stink behind. Then rely on the court system being too lazy, too hostile, or too fucking useless to clean the record properly.
And all of this in a case where the underlying ET3 had its own fucking problems. Cepac denied the interview offer while WhatsApp evidence existed showing I had contemporaneously told a friend about the interview. Cepac denied relevant knowledge while its own pleaded case admitted the agency had passed on a note saying I had been out of work for 12 months due to health problems and was now ready to return.
So while Butler was busy painting me as the problem, the defence itself was sitting there with smoke coming out of its trousers.
The Medical Records Problem
The ugliest part is the medical material.
My SRA complaint alleged that Horsfield Menzies misused medical records and contacted my GP or medical centre. The correspondence in the evidence bundle records that they had used information disclosed by me, namely medical information. It also records that they had spoken with the medical centre responsible for my appointment and reported what they said about alternative appointment availability.
That is the kind of detail that makes the skin crawl.
Because this was not a workplace rota query. This was a disabled litigant’s medical appointment. This was health data. This was a GP setting. This was a solicitor acting for the opposing party, discussing the practical replaceability of a medical appointment in order to resist an adjournment.
Maybe Horsfield Menzies think that is normal. Maybe in the litigation sausage factory, ringing around the edges of a claimant’s medical life feels like “robust representation”. To me, it looked like a firm treating my health as an obstacle to be worked around, not a disability to be respected.
And that is why Butler gets the gong. Not for one letter. Not for one phrase. For the whole nasty little pattern.
The Bundle Ambushes
The ambushes were not poetic. They were procedural.
Late, voluminous material dumped before preliminary hearings. Material pushed beyond the scope of what the Tribunal had ordered. A disabled litigant in person forced to reverse-engineer what had been included, what had been omitted, what had been distorted, and what the Tribunal had actually seen.
That is not ordinary litigation friction. That is a fucking pressure tactic.
The pattern was simple: overload the claimant, stretch or breach the procedural frame, then rely on the claimant’s reaction as evidence of unreasonableness. It is the litigation equivalent of shoving someone down the stairs and complaining about the noise.
And once the Tribunal starts treating the reaction as the problem, the respondent’s solicitors get exactly what they came for: provocation laundered into “conduct”.
The Miller Stunt
Then came the Miller stunt.
Wendy Miller KC had already contested another case against me within the last year. Then she appears in the Cepac/Page world. I viewed that as deliberate antagonism. Not neutral instruction. Not coincidence dressed in a wig. A calculated appointment designed to press exactly the nerve they knew existed.
That point matters because litigation is not only what is filed. It is also what is signalled. Who gets brought in. When they get brought in. What message that sends to a disabled litigant already under pressure. In my view, the message was obvious: we know what unsettles you, and we are going to use it.
The Court Saw The Pressure Pattern And Called The Disabled Claimant’s Reactions Conduct
This is why the Butler/Rubin/Horsfield Menzies conduct cannot be treated as isolated paperwork. It is a pressure architecture. Public hearing. Medical records. Costs threats. Litigation-history smear. Strike-out pressure. Miller. Bundle ambushes. SRA complaint. Then everyone acts shocked when the claimant starts swearing, as though the swear words appeared from the fucking sky rather than from the legal pressure-cooker they helped build.
I often find myself shocked at the stupidest of the stupid cunt part of the population, but I did not expect so many of them to be sitting inside HMCTS and Newcastle Employment Tribunal, pretending to administer justice while rubber-stamping procedural dogshit with the vacant confidence of people who have never had to fight the machine from the wrong side of the desk. How many perverse judgments have come out of this shit-stain arm of the court system because the same filthy trick was allowed to work? How many disabled claimants got provoked, overloaded, medically exposed, financially threatened, cornered, labelled “vexatious” and then processed like inconvenient waste?
Reopen them. Check them. Audit the files. Drag the dusty little bastards into daylight. If justice is what we practise, prove it. Because from here, it does not smell like justice. It smells like a brown envelope sweating on a radiator in a back office nobody wants searched. Maybe it is not corruption. Maybe it is incompetence with a lanyard. Maybe it is class instinct in a cheap suit. Maybe it is tribunal culture so comfortable with represented respondents and so instinctively hostile to furious disabled litigants in person that it cannot tell the difference between judging conduct and laundering provocation. But whatever polite shit-name they want to give it, the stink is there.
Because I refuse to believe a functioning court genuinely failed to see GCOTY’s escalating pattern of provocations. I refuse to believe nobody could follow the sequence unless they were wilfully blind, professionally useless, or so deep in the respondent-friendly sludge that fairness had become a decorative word on a fucking leaflet. First the public-hearing pressure. Then the medical-record leverage. Then the costs threats. Then the litigation-history smear. Then the bundle ambushes. Then the pious little gasp when the disabled claimant finally reacts. That is not a mystery. That is not complexity. That is not a difficult legal puzzle for clever wigs to stroke themselves over. That is cause and effect with a solicitor’s signature at the bottom.
And if Newcastle Employment Tribunal could not see that, the question is no longer just what Sam Butler did. The question is what the Tribunal chose not to see, who benefited from that blindness, and how many other files have been buried under the same neat little pile of procedural horseshit while everyone inside the building told themselves the smell was just the drains.
Why The Gong Is Deserved
Ginger Cunt of the Year is not awarded lightly. There is stiff competition. The legal sector is rammed with polished little sadists who call pressure “strategy” and call vulnerability “risk”. But Butler’s entry stood out because it had range.
He had the costs-threat round. The “bizarre and vexatious” round. The disability-dispute round. The public-hearing round. The litigation-history round. The medical-record round. The bundle-pressure round. The professional-profile hypocrisy round. The whole fucking album.
And all of it in a disability discrimination case brought by a litigant in person.
That is the part they never want said plainly. It is easy to posture as a fearless employment solicitor when the person across the table is a disabled claimant with anxiety, depression, medical records on file, no legal team, and a tribunal system already looking for reasons to treat distress as misconduct. It is easy to look tough when your opponent is being told to juggle health, procedure, public exposure, bundle tactics, and threats of financial ruin.
That is not courage. That is kicking downwards with letterhead.
The Final Citation For The Award
So here it is, Sam.
For services to procedural thuggery.
For outstanding achievement in making a disability discrimination claim feel like a hostage negotiation.
For the phrase “quite frankly bizarre and utterly vexatious conduct” in the context of known mental-health issues.
For threatening £25,000 to £30,000 in costs while presenting withdrawal as the escape hatch.
For helping turn medical records into a battlefield.
For the public-hearing pressure.
For the litigation-history smear-and-retreat bastardry.
For the firm-level silence while Rubin sat in the oversight lane.
For participating in the broader Horsfield Menzies production of “nice website, nasty file”.
TCAP awards you Ginger Cunt of the Year.
Polish the trophy. Put it beside the profile photo. Then maybe ask why a firm that sells employment-law respectability ended up starring in an SRA complaint alleging gaslighting, medical-record misuse, disability pressure, and costs intimidation.
Because the profile says professional.
The file says something else.
And the file has receipts.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – Sam Butler Profile
- SRA Evidence Bundle – Thompson v Cepac / Horsfield Menzies Correspondence
- SRA Complaint Cover Letter – Formal Complaint Against Horsfield Menzies Solicitors, Sam Butler, and Daniel Rubin
- Thompson v Cepac Ltd – ET Case 6019060/2024 Evidence Bundle
- Dr Melanie Pritchard Letter – 14 March 2025
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