Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – SIMON HORSFIELD’S CARPET HAS A FUCKING LUMP IN IT

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Simon Horsfield once looked at the racism scandal engulfing Yorkshire County Cricket Club and decided there were lessons to be learned.

Good for Simon.

In “Lessons from YCC”, he asks how a former player could raise allegations of racism, an investigation could follow, the initial response could prove so inadequate and the organisation could still somehow stagger onwards apparently surprised that the problem had not gone away. Horsfield identifies part of the answer in a culture which “refused to accept change or challenge”.

He does not stop there. Simon produces six learning points for the rest of us.

Accept challenge. Reflect. Change when change is required. If you get something wrong, “hold your hand up and apologise when you get it wrong” rather than making yourself look ridiculous trying to defend it. Speak up when something unacceptable happens. If you are the person on the receiving end, use the proper internal channels. Most importantly for present purposes, organisations should demonstrate that complaints are taken seriously rather than “brush them under the carpet”.

That is genuinely good advice.

A few years later I followed it.

I used the internal channel.

I sent the complaint to Simon fucking Horsfield.

Simon’s Practical Examination

On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed complaint about Senior Associate Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Daniel Rubin and Simon Horsfield. These were not random names copied in for dramatic effect. They were senior people at the firm, including the man whose surname is literally on the door.

The complaint concerned matters I regarded as serious: the handling and use of disability-related medical information, contact involving my medical centre, disputed statements during the litigation, aggressive costs pressure and correspondence which I believed had crossed well beyond robust representation.

There was plenty available to investigate.

Nine days earlier, Butler had written to the Employment Tribunal stating that Horsfield Menzies had spoken to the medical centre responsible for my appointment. The firm said it had established when an alternative appointment might be available and used that information while arguing against postponement of the hearing.

Whatever view Horsfield Menzies took of my objections, the underlying event was not imaginary.

They had contacted the medical centre.

I complained about it.

And, beautifully, Simon Horsfield had already written an article telling people what to do next.

Use the internal channels.

Challenge unacceptable conduct.

Take complaints seriously.

Do not put them under the fucking carpet.

You could hardly ask for a more convenient practical examination.

The Internal Channel Was Open

This matters because organisations often become strangely enthusiastic about internal procedures when somebody complains publicly.

Why didn’t you raise it with us first?

Why didn’t you give us an opportunity to investigate?

Why go outside the organisation before exhausting the proper channels?

Simon had already made essentially the same point in his YCC article. If you are on the receiving end of unacceptable behaviour, use the appropriate internal route.

So I did.

The complaint itself was private. I did not require Simon to accept every allegation because my name appeared at the bottom of an email. I wanted the allegations examined. That is what investigations are for. If Butler had done nothing wrong, there was a perfectly respectable outcome available: look at the evidence, establish what happened and tell me why the complaint failed.

Perhaps some points would survive and others would not. Maybe the medical-centre contact had an entirely defensible basis. Perhaps the disputed statements could be explained. An actual investigation might even have produced material helpful to Horsfield Menzies.

Instead, what came back was not a meaningful or constructive investigation outcome but, if memory serves, little more than a couple of lines from Rubin amounting to a flat denial. No detailed findings were communicated to me, no meaningful engagement with the substance and no explanation from Horsfield of what he had done with the complaint placed directly in front of him.

The internal channel had worked beautifully.

My email arrived.

Simon, Meet Carpet

This is where Simon’s old article becomes magnificent.

His sixth lesson was not merely that an organisation should have a policy saying bullying and harassment are naughty. He expressly warned that policy alone is not enough. Culture matters. People need to feel able to speak up and challenge what they believe is wrong, and the organisation then has to show that complaints are actually taken seriously.

That is a much harder standard than having a nice PDF.

It means the test of your culture comes when somebody raises an allegation you do not like, against somebody you value, at an inconvenient time, while another commercial interest is already in play.

Anyone can take an easy complaint seriously.

The useful test is the awkward one.

Mine was awkward. Butler was acting for a client in live litigation. I was the opposing disabled litigant. The relationship was already hostile. Investigating my allegations properly could potentially have required senior people at Horsfield Menzies to scrutinise the conduct of their own colleague while the firm was simultaneously trying to defeat my case.

Now that is challenge.

Simon had written glowingly about accepting it.

When the practical version turned up, however, the institutional appetite appeared noticeably less heroic.

There was no meaningful investigation outcome communicated to me.

Which leaves us with the carpet.

And the carpet has a bastard lump in it.

Defending The Indefensible

Simon’s second YCC lesson is even better. When you get something wrong, acknowledge it. Trying to defend something indefensible can make an organisation look ridiculous and cause consequences far beyond the original mistake.

Notice what I am not saying here.

I am not saying Horsfield Menzies was obliged to apologise because I complained. An apology comes after establishing that something went wrong. An organisation which automatically confesses whenever somebody sends an angry email would be every bit as useless as one which automatically denies everything.

The missing stage is the interesting one.

Find out.

That was the opportunity Simon had.

A meaningful investigation could have exonerated Butler. It could have identified misunderstanding. It might have found that some conduct was defensible but badly explained. Perhaps it would have concluded that one discrete aspect required correction while everything else was rejected.

Any of those possibilities would have demonstrated precisely the kind of institutional maturity Horsfield praised when observing somebody else’s disaster.

Instead, from my side of the carpet, the visible process was remarkably simple: allegation in, denial out.

That is not reflection.

That is a fucking switch.

Big Picture Simon

Horsfield Menzies describes Simon as a “big picture thinker” who is also highly detail oriented, calm in a crisis and experienced in helping organisations manage employment risk. His profile presents somebody trusted with difficult situations, Board-level advice and contentious litigation.

Perfect.

The big picture was easy enough.

A disabled litigant was saying that conduct by a solicitor at Simon’s firm had itself become part of an already hostile discrimination dispute. The allegations involved medical information, the medical centre, litigation tactics and costs pressure. Whatever their ultimate merit, they had obvious potential to become a professional, regulatory and reputational problem if handled badly.

The detail should have been equally interesting.

What exactly happened? Why was the medical centre contacted? Who authorised it? What was the intended purpose? What information was sought? Was the subsequent use considered appropriate? What did Butler say about the other allegations? Which documents were reviewed? Who reached the conclusion? What was the conclusion?

Those are questions.

Simon likes challenge.

Allegedly.

What I received was not an answer to that catalogue in any meaningful sense.

For a big-picture thinker with an eye for detail, the middle appears to have gone missing.

How To Spot A Culture

This is the cleverest thing Simon wrote in the YCC piece, although I am not sure he realised how useful it would become.

Policy is not culture.

You can have immaculate wording somewhere on a website. You can send employees on training courses. You can tell clients about speaking up, psychological safety and responsible leadership until LinkedIn itself asks for a lie down.

Culture is what happens after somebody actually challenges you.

That was Horsfield’s point about Yorkshire.

The institution had rules, structures and an investigation, yet the deeper problem was a culture unable or unwilling to process the challenge properly. The problem became larger because the organisation’s response exposed something about itself.

The subject matter of my complaint is plainly not comparable in gravity with Azeem Rafiq’s experiences. That would be an absurd comparison.

The institutional lesson is comparable because Simon deliberately wrote it as a general lesson for organisations.

How do you behave when someone challenges your own people?

That question travels.

At Yorkshire, Simon could see the answer from miles away.

At Horsfield Menzies, I handed him the question personally.

The Firm With Its Own Name On It

There is another reason Simon cannot disappear behind the junior solicitor handling the file.

This is not Butler Menzies.

It is not Rubin Menzies.

Simon Horsfield founded a firm bearing his own name and publicly talks about its values, culture and approach. Horsfield Menzies markets itself as “The People Focused Law Firm” and emphasises that its values are integral to the business.

Fine.

Then Simon has more than an ornamental relationship with the culture.

If a senior associate becomes the subject of a detailed complaint and that complaint lands with Simon Horsfield himself, what happens next says something about the organisation Simon built. He cannot reasonably spend his public life advising other organisations that leadership must create cultures capable of receiving challenge and then become philosophically irrelevant when challenge arrives at Horsfield Menzies.

This is precisely when the name on the stationery starts carrying weight.

You want the prestige of the surname.

You get the complaint with it.

A Useful Thought Experiment

Imagine Simon advising one of his corporate clients.

An employee raises a lengthy complaint about a senior manager. The allegations involve sensitive personal information and conduct occurring during an already difficult dispute. Instead of commissioning a meaningful review, senior management sends back a brief denial and carries on.

Later it emerges that the organisation’s own leadership had previously lectured others about accepting challenge, apologising when wrong and making sure complaints were not swept aside.

What would Employment Lawyer Simon say?

Would he tell the client that this was an exemplary display of organisational learning?

Would he recommend the phrase NOTHING TO SEE HERE as a grievance procedure?

Would the big-picture thinker perhaps suggest that a slightly more demonstrable process might be prudent?

I have a suspicion Brochure Simon would have thoughts.

That is the recurring problem with Horsfield Menzies.

Their lawyers are often very good when giving advice to other people.

The Carpet Problem

The carpet metaphor deserves to stay because Simon chose it.

Brushing something under the carpet never makes it disappear. It just moves the problem somewhere less immediately visible. Enough gets pushed underneath and eventually the floor itself starts looking strange.

Horsfield Menzies had my complaint privately.

That was the smallest it was ever going to be.

No Blog vs Behaviour article existed. No Simon Horsfield search result had to be created. The problem was contained in correspondence between the people directly involved and senior members of the firm.

That was the cheap moment.

Investigate it. Explain it. Correct something if necessary. Give me a reasoned outcome.

Instead, the complaint survived because nothing meaningful arrived that persuaded me it had actually been confronted.

Then it grew.

It became part of the regulatory complaints.

It became part of the litigation history.

It became Category Fucking Zero.

Now it is part of a series built almost entirely around comparing what Horsfield Menzies tells other organisations to do with what happened when the same principles became inconvenient at Horsfield Menzies.

That is a fairly substantial fucking lump.

An Expert In Other People’s Mistakes

There is something uniquely comic about management advice when the author later encounters his own test.

Simon was excellent on Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

He understood stubborn institutions. He understood refusal to accept challenge. He understood why defending something indefinitely can make matters worse. He understood that people should use internal channels and that organisations need to prove those channels mean something.

This was not obscure law.

It was judgment.

And judgment is supposed to travel home with you.

Otherwise Blog Simon is merely a spectator at other people’s failures, pointing sagely at the wreckage and explaining what wiser men would have done.

That is easy.

The difficult version begins when the uncomfortable allegation has @horsfieldmenzies.com at the end of the email address.

Suddenly the lesson is not about Yorkshire.

It is about Simon.

The Practical Result

The cleanest way to test this article is to strip out all the rhetoric.

Simon Horsfield wrote that organisations should accept challenge.

I challenged his firm.

He encouraged people who experience unacceptable conduct to use internal channels.

I sent the complaint directly to him and the other senior people controlling Horsfield Menzies.

Simon said organisations should demonstrate that they take complaints seriously and not brush them under the carpet.

I received no meaningful or constructive investigation outcome addressing the complaint I had put before them.

There it is.

Blog.

Behaviour.

No great theory required.

Hold Your Hand Up

I particularly enjoy Simon’s advice about apologising because it assumes something rather admirable.

An organisation can survive being wrong.

In fact, acknowledging a mistake early can stop it becoming the defining story.

That is true.

It is also the part institutions seem to find hardest.

A correction feels dangerous. An apology feels like weakness. Admitting that somebody inside the organisation might have handled something badly creates immediate legal and reputational anxiety, so everyone reaches instinctively for denial.

Then the small problem becomes a credibility problem.

Simon knew this.

He wrote it down.

Horsfield Menzies did not even need to conclude that my complaint was wholly correct. A serious response could have disagreed with me while still demonstrating investigation, reflection and independence.

That would have been enough to show the mechanism existed.

Instead, I was left with no meaningful investigation outcome and the increasingly unavoidable impression that Horsfield Menzies’ appetite for challenge was much healthier when the organisation being challenged was Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

Lessons From HM

Perhaps Simon should update the article.

Lessons From Horsfield Menzies.

  1. Publishing good advice creates evidence that you knew better.
  2. Telling people to use internal channels is dangerous if they actually do.
  3. A complaint against your own colleague/employee is still a complaint.
  4. Denial is not automatically an investigation because a solicitor typed it.
  5. Reputation problems are generally cheapest before the complainant learns SEO.
  6. Check underneath the fucking carpet.

I would be happy to contribute.

No charge.

The Carpet Has A Fucking Lump In It

That is ultimately why Simon is such a clean Blog vs Behaviour target.

The contradiction comes from his own hand.

He told organisations to accept change and challenge. He told people to speak up. He told recipients of unacceptable conduct to use internal channels. He warned organisations that having policies is not enough and that their culture must demonstrate complaints are genuinely taken seriously.

Then a complaint about Horsfield Menzies reached Simon Horsfield.

Whatever happened internally, no meaningful investigation outcome was communicated to me.

Perhaps there is a magnificent investigative file somewhere. Interviews. Findings. Analysis. Thoughtful conclusions. If so, Horsfield Menzies has never troubled me with it.

What I can judge is what reached the complainant.

Very fucking little.

Simon once looked at Yorkshire County Cricket Club and understood that refusing challenge was not strength. It was institutional blindness.

He understood that defending problems could make them bigger.

Most prophetically of all, he understood the carpet.

So have another look down, Simon.

That shape underneath it?

That’s yours.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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