Horsfield Menzies trainee solicitor Marcia Sumbe wrote an article telling employers exactly what to do when misconduct may arise from disability. Spot the link. Obtain medical evidence. Consider workplace stress. Adjust the process. Help the disabled person regulate their conduct. Excellent advice. Shame about the fucking case file. In Thompson v Cepac, Horsfield Menzies had GP evidence explicitly describing severe anxiety, difficulty controlling emotions and stress-linked outbursts, then helped turn the resulting behaviour into the machinery used to strike the disability-discrimination case out. Better still, Sumbe herself later appears directly in the correspondence surrounding the search for replacement counsel, along with being copied into a lot of correspondence. Welcome back to Blog vs Behaviour.
When Misconduct Meets Disability
On 24 June 2025, Horsfield Menzies published an article with a title so perfectly suited to TCAP that somebody should probably check whether we commissioned it.
When Misconduct Meets Disability.
Written by Marcia Sumbe, the article discusses Garner v Thorpe Hall Leisure, where an Employment Tribunal accepted that a worker’s inability to control her anger flowed from anxiety, depression and other disability-related conditions.
Sumbe then gives employers practical advice.
Spot the possible connection early.
Ask whether aggression, withdrawal or abruptness could result from an underlying health condition.
Pause.
Obtain medical evidence.
Ask how the condition may have contributed to the behaviour.
Consider medication, therapy and workplace stressors.
Think about adjustments that could help the disabled person participate fully or regulate their conduct.
There is more.
Shorter meetings might help.
Written questions in advance might help.
A less intimidating environment might help.
A video meeting might help.
The point, Sumbe explains, is not that disability provides a free pass for misconduct. The point is that the process itself must not disadvantage somebody because of the effects of disability.
That is sensible employment-law advice.
TCAP agrees.
Now open the other Horsfield Menzies file.
Meet The Disabled Litigant In Their Own Case
The underlying Cepac case concerned disability discrimination arising from a recruitment process.
By the time Horsfield Menzies was building its conduct case against Lee Thompson, the firm had medical evidence directly addressing his mental health and emotional regulation.
Their own April 2026 response to Thompson’s skeleton argument quotes a GP letter dated 14 March 2025:
“He has a history of mental health problems with depression and anxiety, and he experiences difficulty controlling his emotions. He finds it difficult to manage frustration especially under stress.”
The same Horsfield Menzies document then quotes another GP letter dated 28 April 2025 recording ongoing severe anxiety, difficulty controlling emotions and Thompson’s account that emotional outbursts, voluminous emails and slips in tone arose from high stress, anxiety and low mood.
Read those sentences again.
Then go back to Marcia Sumbe’s blog.
Spot the possible link early.
The link was not hiding behind the fucking filing cabinet.
It was written by a doctor.
The Blog Says Investigate The Link. The Submission Says Stop Mentioning It
This is where Blog vs Behaviour earns its name.
Sumbe’s article tells employers that when disability may be connected to behaviour, they should investigate that connection and obtain medical evidence before deciding what to do.
Horsfield Menzies had medical evidence.
Yet its response in the Cepac litigation described Thompson’s disability as the “principle reason” he gave for his conduct and argued that even a “generous interpretation” of the GP letters would only excuse some comments or emails made in acute stress.
Then the language hardens.
The firm argued that the GP evidence did not give Thompson “carte blanche” for what it characterised as a sustained campaign of abuse.
Fine.
Nobody suggested a diagnosis prints diplomatic immunity.
But Horsfield Menzies did not stop at saying some behaviour remained unacceptable. Its strike-out submission went further and complained about Thompson’s:
“repeated attempts to link this to his alleged mental illness in the absence of any supporting evidence”.
That sentence sits in a document which, several pages earlier, quotes the fucking supporting medical evidence.
There is the problem.
Not whether every tweet, email or insult can be clinically attributed to anxiety.
Not whether disability excuses everything.
The problem is the firm simultaneously possessing medical evidence of impaired emotional regulation under stress while characterising the disabled litigant’s attempts to explain the relationship as repeated attempts to invoke an “alleged mental illness”.
Blog Marcia says investigate the connection.
Litigation Horsfield Menzies says stop trying to make the connection.
The website gets empathy.
The bundle gets a scalpel.
Apparently Workplace Stress Matters Too
Sumbe’s article does not merely tell employers to obtain a medical report.
It specifically tells them to consider workplace stressors.
That is particularly unfortunate.
Throughout the Cepac proceedings, Thompson repeatedly argued that his communications and deterioration were reactions to the litigation environment itself. He complained about procedural uncertainty, late material, service problems, unresolved complaints, asymmetry, disability adjustments and the way his reactions were increasingly being collected and returned to the Tribunal as evidence of misconduct.
Horsfield Menzies rejected that analysis.
Its April 2026 response said Thompson’s social-media activity often occurred when nothing was happening procedurally and therefore undermined his argument that the conduct represented a stress response. It characterised the wider activity as deliberate, calculated and unreasonable.
Again, the firm was entitled to argue its client’s case.
TCAP is entitled to put that argument beside its own fucking blog.
Because Sumbe’s public guidance does not say:
Consider stressors, unless you think the disabled person is unpleasant.
It says consider workplace stressors.
That is exactly what Thompson repeatedly asked the litigation process to do.
Instead, his reactions became evidence.
Reasonable Adjustments On The Website
Then we reach the part that deserves framing.
Sumbe tells employers that where behaviour may be disability-linked, reasonable adjustments to the process might include:
shorter staged meetings;
written questions in advance;
a less intimidating setting;
a companion familiar with the condition;
or even video attendance to reduce anxiety and support better communication.
Video attendance.
Interesting.
Because Thompson repeatedly sought procedural adjustments during the Cepac litigation while describing acute stress and disability-related difficulty participating.
The claimant-side material records requests concerning remote attendance, hearing format, communication management and clearer directions. It also describes a cycle in which procedural uncertainty generated reactive correspondence, which was then relied upon as further evidence of conduct.
Horsfield Menzies, meanwhile, catalogued his applications and communications as part of the case for strike-out.
That is the extraordinary inversion.
The blog says:
Adjust the process to reduce the disability-linked reaction.
The litigation strategy became:
Collect the reaction and put it in the bundle.
Same employment law.
Same Equality Act.
Very different fucking user experience.
191 Pages Of Reaction
And collect it they did.
Horsfield Menzies’ April response identifies two dedicated conduct compilations inside the combined bundle.
Document 1 ran from pages 1409 to 1512.
Document 2 ran from pages 1513 to 1599.
That is 191 pages of extracted communications, blog material and X posts assembled specifically for the strike-out application.
The underlying discrimination claim never received a merits determination.
Instead, hundreds of pieces of Thompson’s behaviour became exhibits in the argument about whether the case should survive long enough to be heard.
That is why Sumbe’s article is such a gift.
She writes that employers should ask how disability contributes to behaviour.
Horsfield Menzies helped build a case around the behaviour.
She writes that stressors matter.
Thompson said stressors were driving his deterioration.
She writes that adjustments can help somebody regulate conduct and participate.
The litigation increasingly treated the dysregulation itself as evidence supporting termination of the proceedings.
You could teach a seminar from the contrast.
In fact, Horsfield Menzies almost fucking did.
Marcia Was Not In Another Building
There would still be a good article here if Marcia Sumbe were merely an employment solicitor whose marketing copy happened to age badly beside another team member’s litigation file.
Unfortunately for Horsfield Menzies, the paperwork brings her closer.
In February 2026, when replacement counsel was being sought in Cepac v Thompson and Page Outsourcing UK Limited, correspondence from Nine Chambers was sent directly to Marcia Sumbe, with Daniel Rubin copied.
Days later, Kings Chambers replied directly to Sumbe regarding the same case and the difficulty of obtaining replacement counsel.
So Marcia Sumbe was not an abstract content author sitting on a different planet writing cheerful employment-law tips while somebody else dealt with the unpleasant file.
Her name appears in the operational correspondence surrounding it.
That does not mean Sumbe personally authored every submission.
It means Blog vs Behaviour does not have to travel very far down the corridor.
The writer telling employers how carefully disability-linked misconduct should be handled was inside the correspondence stream of a case where her own firm was pressing for a disabled claimant’s case to be struck out because of conduct it repeatedly characterised as unreasonable, vexatious and abusive.
That is not a metaphor.
It is an email address.
The Most Expensive Word Is “Pause”
Perhaps the best advice in Sumbe’s article is one word.
Pause.
Pause and obtain medical evidence.
Pause and understand causation.
Pause before deciding that conduct tells you everything you need to know about the disabled person producing it.
That is excellent advice because reaction is easy to see. Cause takes work.
A furious email is visible.
The anxiety behind it is not.
A swear word fits neatly into a bundle.
Months of accumulated stress do not.
A social-media post can be screenshotted in seconds.
Understanding why a disabled litigant has deteriorated requires somebody to stop feeding the printer and ask a more difficult question.
Horsfield Menzies knew that when it wrote the blog.
It knew that medical evidence mattered.
It knew stressors mattered.
It knew process design mattered.
It knew reasonable adjustments could reduce defensiveness and emotional dysregulation.
It knew that misconduct can meet disability.
Then Lee Thompson arrived.
Apparently the meeting room was already booked.
Blog vs Behaviour
This is why TCAP is going through the Horsfield Menzies blog.
Not because employment solicitors should be forbidden from writing general legal updates.
Quite the opposite.
Keep writing them.
They are useful.
Every article tells clients what Horsfield Menzies says good practice looks like.
TCAP has the unusual luxury of possessing another dataset: what Horsfield Menzies looked like when the disabled person was on the opposite side of the table.
That makes Blog vs Behaviour extremely simple.
Their article.
Their standard.
Their words.
Our file.
Compare.
Marcia Sumbe’s article says employers should identify disability-linked conduct early, obtain medical evidence, examine stressors, make reasonable adjustments and avoid allowing the process itself to disadvantage somebody because of disability.
The Cepac file contains medical evidence of anxiety, depression and impaired emotional regulation under stress.
Horsfield Menzies quoted it.
Then Horsfield Menzies built the conduct case anyway.
The brochure says When Misconduct Meets Disability.
TCAP has now supplied the sequel.
When Misconduct Meets Disability, Unless It Is Lee Thompson.
Surgical Summer continues. Snip.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – When Misconduct Meets Disability
- TCAP Case File – Horsfield Menzies, First Respondent’s Response to Claimant’s Skeleton Argument, 30 March 2026, updated 21 April 2026
- TCAP Case File – Claimant Working Bundle of Potentially Missing Materials, Thompson v Cepac Limited and Page Outsourcing UK Limited, 6019060/2024