Most Horsfield Menzies authors write the décor. Mental health matters. Equality matters. Complaints matter. Fairness matters. Sensitive information should be handled carefully and investigations should be balanced. The website is full of the polished moral furniture expected from a modern employment-law firm trying to look thoughtful, progressive and vaguely human.
Then Angus Menzies writes something, and the fucking mask slips.
It happened with “What a Relief!”, where Fungus calmly described the economics of attrition in employment litigation. Claimants may give up, settle low or run out of money. Employers understand that, lawyers understand that and, from the employer’s perspective, the claimant exhausting themselves before the end may amount to a perfectly satisfactory result. Angus did not seem particularly embarrassed by the machinery; he simply pointed at it and explained how it worked.
Now we have “To Postpone Or Not To Postpone”, and somehow he has done it again. This time the pressure point is not money but health. Instead of the claimant running out of cash, Angus examines what happens when a disabled litigant runs out of the ability to participate at all.
At this point, I am starting to think the other Horsfield Menzies authors provide the curtains while Fungus keeps wandering into the room carrying the fucking operating manual.
Fungus Finds The Empty Chair
Angus’s article concerns Kaler v Insights ESC Ltd, a case involving an autistic litigant in person whose Employment Tribunal hearing went badly wrong. Ms Kaler had been dismissed after sending emails described as abusive, threatening and harassing, together with sexually inappropriate messages to a colleague. She later brought disability-discrimination claims and eventually reached a lengthy merits hearing.
The Tribunal had already considered adjustments. Breaks were allowed and measures were taken around questioning, but after giving evidence Kaler became too unwell to continue. An ambulance was called while she was described as being in the middle of a meltdown and struggling to speak, and she sought postponement.
The Tribunal wanted medical evidence. At that stage, it did not have what it considered sufficient material, so the postponement request was refused and the hearing ultimately continued without her. A GP letter arrived afterwards confirming that she had suffered a panic attack caused by the combination of autism and the pressure of the Tribunal hearing and had been unfit to participate.
Even that did not reverse the position.
The EAT later upheld the Tribunal’s approach. It accepted that the Tribunal could consider the age of the case, prejudice to the respondent and its witnesses, and the possibility that postponing matters would simply recreate the same difficulty at a resumed hearing.
That last point is the part Angus seems to find especially useful.
The claimant is genuinely too unwell to participate, yet the possibility that she may become too unwell again later can itself become a reason not to wait.
That is fucking cold.
And Fungus noticed.
The Same Problem Might Happen Again
Read the logic carefully and the brutality is almost elegant. A temporary health crisis ordinarily supports delay because there is a reasonable prospect that the person will recover and participate later. A recurring disability complicates the equation because the very condition creating the need for accommodation may persist into the future.
The result is a strange procedural inversion. The disability which makes postponement necessary today can also weaken the argument for postponement tomorrow because the Tribunal may conclude that the same difficulty will simply recur. The claimant’s vulnerability does not disappear, but its persistence becomes part of the case for continuing.
Angus did not invent that reasoning. He was reporting a real EAT judgment and accurately extracting the practical lesson for employers. His article advises anybody seeking postponement because of ill health to provide robust medical evidence, provide it promptly, explain why justice requires the hearing to stop and address the prejudice that delay may cause the opposing party and its witnesses.
Even then, he stresses that postponement is not guaranteed.
Legally useful.
Humanly bleak.
And this is where Angus differs from most of the Horsfield Menzies content factory. Another author might spend half the article explaining the importance of wellbeing, vulnerability and balancing competing interests with compassion. Fungus looks at the pressure gauge.
The claimant is unwell. The respondent is inconvenienced. Medical evidence may be incomplete. The case is old. The problem may recur.
The hearing can still move.
What A Relief, Again
This would be less interesting if it were just one slightly cold article.
It is not.
Place “What a Relief!” beside “To Postpone Or Not To Postpone” and a recurring worldview starts to appear. The first piece is about endurance. The second is about participation. In one, the claimant may lose the financial ability to continue. In the other, the claimant may lose the medical ability to continue.
Either way, Angus is fascinated by what happens once the human being reaches a limit.
That is the thread.
In “What a Relief!”, the pressure point is money. A claimant can exhaust resources, settle low, give up or simply run out of cash. Angus understands that employers and their lawyers can regard such attrition as strategically useful.
In “To Postpone Or Not To Postpone”, the pressure point is health. A disabled claimant can become medically incapable of continuing, produce later evidence confirming what happened and still find that the case has moved on without them.
Money runs out.
Health gives way.
Procedure remains.
Other Horsfield Menzies writers talk about values. Fungus keeps publishing the bits that explain what happens when values have stopped being the most commercially interesting question.
There is something almost admirable about the lack of shame.
Almost.
The Little Litigation Sociopath
There is a little fucking sociopath quality to Angus’s writing, not because I am diagnosing him with anything, but because of the way human misery repeatedly enters his articles as a litigation variable.
A claimant loses their income and Angus notices the attrition consequence. A claimant may run out of money and he notices the settlement consequence. A disabled litigant suffers a meltdown during a hearing and he notices the evidential requirement. A GP later confirms panic and inability to participate, yet he notices that this still does not guarantee postponement. If the same health problem might recur later, he notices that too.
That is what makes him more interesting than a pantomime villain.
He does not need to enjoy the suffering.
He simply appears unusually alert to its utility.
That is a much more corporate kind of coldness. No white cat, no evil laugh, no theatrical cruelty. Just somebody looking at human vulnerability and asking what it does to the litigation timetable.
Fungus does not see the injured claimant first.
He sees the fucking leverage.
The Respondent Still Has Rights
To be fair to Angus, the respondent plainly does have rights. Tribunals cannot postpone proceedings indefinitely every time one party struggles. Witnesses have lives, memories fade, evidence deteriorates and old cases become harder to try properly. The opposing party is entitled to resolution within a reasonable time.
That is orthodox and obvious.
The asymmetry remains worth examining.
A corporate respondent usually has lawyers, institutional continuity and multiple human beings capable of carrying the case forward. If one witness becomes unavailable, the organisation itself does not disappear. It continues operating, continues instructing lawyers and continues preparing its position.
A disabled litigant in person is different. If that individual becomes medically incapable of participating, the claimant’s entire advocacy function can disappear at once. Nobody else may know the evidence intimately, nobody else may be able to cross-examine witnesses and nobody else may be capable of responding in real time to whatever happens in the room.
Yet both forms of prejudice still go onto the scales.
Institutional inconvenience on one side.
Potential inability to participate in your own case on the other.
And the scales can still tip towards continuation.
Angus knows that.
More importantly, he apparently thought employers should know it too.
Then Horsfield Menzies Met Me
Years later, Horsfield Menzies found itself representing Cepac against another disabled litigant in person. Different case, different facts and different disability, but the procedural terrain had some uncomfortable similarities.
My Cepac proceedings involved serious mental-health difficulties, medical evidence, participation problems and repeated disputes about postponement and whether hearings should continue. Medical participation was not an administrative footnote; it became contested territory in its own right.
At one stage, Horsfield Menzies contacted the medical centre connected with an appointment and obtained information about alternative appointment availability while opposing postponement. That episode remains one of the strangest features of the file because the respondent’s solicitors were no longer merely arguing that the evidence before the Tribunal was insufficient. They had gone looking for information about when I might instead be able to obtain medical attention and then used that information within the procedural fight over whether the hearing should wait.
Whatever legal justification Horsfield Menzies believed supported that exercise, the mentality is difficult to miss.
Health had become a litigation variable.
Fungus had already written the fucking chapter.
A Simple Claim Becomes Something Else
The original Cepac dispute was compact. Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024. I say an interview was offered for after the bank holiday, the training salary was discussed and my mental-health history entered the recruitment conversation. A contemporaneous WhatsApp recorded “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”.
The expected confirmation disappeared and Cepac later denied that an interview had ever been offered. That was the factual dispute the proceedings were supposed to resolve.
Employment Judge T. R. Smith subsequently described the proceedings as a “simple claim”, adding that I was essentially upset because I had not got a job. Complete fucking bollocks. By then, the Tribunal file stood at approximately 1,941 pages.
The recruitment call had not become 1,941 pages complicated.
The litigation around me had.
Medical evidence, participation, postponement, correspondence, conduct, previous litigation, TCAP and X all became part of an expanding procedural landscape. Eventually, the hearing which mattered most proceeded without me and the discrimination claim was struck out without a completed merits determination of the recruitment dispute.
I am not suggesting Kaler dictated what happened in Cepac. That would be ridiculous.
The point is that Angus had already studied exactly how this kind of procedural terrain works.
He knew what happens when the disabled person cannot remain in the chair.
He Knew The Terrain
That is why the two Angus articles fit together so neatly.
Fungus knew the financial terrain because he had already written about claimants exhausting money, settling low or giving up. He knew the participation terrain because he had written about a disabled litigant becoming incapable of continuing, a postponement request failing and the hearing progressing without her.
He knew that later medical evidence confirming panic did not automatically undo the procedural decision. He knew that the prospect of the same problem recurring could count against waiting. He knew that prejudice to the respondent could outweigh the claimant’s interest in personal participation.
None of this proves that Angus designed some secret strategy for my case.
It tells me something more interesting.
The institutional knowledge was there.
Fungus knew how these things could end because he had already fucking blogged about them.
Other Authors Write Values
This is where Angus starts looking increasingly different from the rest of Horsfield Menzies.
Most of the firm’s public writing is exactly what you would expect from an employment boutique trying to appear sensible, progressive and commercially useful. Mental-health awareness, equality, data protection, fair investigations, bias, complaints, whistleblowing and reasonable adjustments all receive the polished treatment.
Then Angus appears.
Claimants may run out of money.
Disabled litigants may still lose postponement applications.
Hearings may continue without them.
Medical evidence needs to be robust.
Even robust evidence gives no guarantee.
The same health problem recurring later may itself become part of the reason not to wait.
Cheers, Fungus.
Perhaps somebody should put him in charge of brand warmth.
The other authors tell employers how humane organisations should behave.
Angus keeps explaining where the system remains useful after the human being starts fucking collapsing.
The Mask Keeps Slipping
This is why I no longer think Angus’s articles are accidental little moments of candour.
The pattern is too good.
“What a Relief!” looked at claimants running out of financial road. “To Postpone Or Not To Postpone” looks at a disabled litigant running out of medical road. Both pieces examine what happens when the claimant’s ability to continue begins failing before the legal process does.
That seems to be where Angus’s professional eye naturally goes.
Not merely: what is the law?
More interestingly: where is the pressure point?
How long can the claimant finance this?
What happens when they cannot?
How strong is the medical evidence?
What happens if the problem recurs?
How much prejudice does delay cause the respondent?
Can the case continue without the claimant?
Those are legitimate legal questions.
Taken together, they also reveal a particular way of looking at people.
Human vulnerability becomes procedural information.
That is why the mask keeps slipping whenever Fungus writes. The rest of Horsfield Menzies spends considerable effort telling us about values. Angus keeps showing us the machinery underneath them.
The Empty Chair Is Still A Legal Outcome
There is something worth remembering about Kaler.
The Tribunal did not need to decide that the claimant was faking.
It did not need to conclude that autism was irrelevant.
It did not need to reject the later GP evidence confirming panic.
The system could recognise that she was genuinely unwell and still continue without her.
That is the part that makes the case so useful to Angus’s audience.
The harshest procedural outcomes do not always require anyone to deny vulnerability. Sometimes vulnerability can be accepted in full and simply outweighed by other considerations.
That is much colder than disbelief.
Nobody needs to call the claimant a liar.
Nobody needs to say the disability is imaginary.
Nobody needs to pretend the panic attack did not happen.
The institution simply says the case must move.
The chair stays empty.
The hearing carries on.
And Fungus has an article explaining why.
The Honest Face Of Horsfield Menzies
Maybe this is Angus’s real contribution to the firm.
The other authors help maintain the brand.
Angus occasionally tells us what the business actually knows.
Employment litigation is not merely about rights and fairness. It is also about stamina, money, evidence, time, procedure and the ability to remain functional long enough to reach the end.
Companies usually have more of those resources than individual claimants.
Fungus appears keenly aware of that asymmetry.
He sees the claimant’s resources depleting and understands what it does to the case. He sees the person becoming medically incapable of continuing and understands that the Tribunal may eventually stop waiting.
That does not make the law wrong.
It makes the article revealing.
The question is not whether Angus accurately understands employment litigation.
I suspect he understands it extremely fucking well.
That is the problem.
Every Time Fungus Writes
Most Blog vs Behaviour pieces are built on contradiction. The lawyer publishes a principle, TCAP opens the file and the behaviour sits awkwardly beside the sermon.
Angus is becoming something else.
His blog pieces increasingly feel less like sermons and more like disclosures.
“What a Relief!” showed the economic pressure point.
“To Postpone Or Not To Postpone” shows the medical one.
In both, the human being can fail before the procedure does.
That appears to be the bit Fungus finds worth writing about.
Other Horsfield Menzies authors explain what responsible employment practice should look like. Angus keeps explaining what happens when responsibility is no longer the most useful question in the room.
Every fucking time he writes, the mask slips a little further.
At this rate, TCAP does not need to expose Angus Menzies.
We just need to keep letting the little cunt publish.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – To Postpone Or Not To Postpone
- GOV.UK – Ms K Kaler v Insights ESC Ltd : [2024] EAT 195
- TCAP – Angus Menzies Horsfield Menzies : He Wrote The Fucking Playbook
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cepac Limited and Page Outsourcing UK Limited, case 6019060/2024
- TCAP documentary record – medical and postponement correspondence; Horsfield Menzies correspondence concerning medical-centre appointment availability; hearing correspondence; strike-out materials; judgment and costs material.