Marcia Sumbe has now written something rather more dangerous than another Horsfield Menzies checklist.
She has written a principle.
A decision can look defensible on the substance and still be ruined by the process used to reach or review it. You do not get to wave the underlying reason around like a permission slip while the procedure collapses behind you. Fairness is not simply about whether you might eventually have arrived at the same destination. How you got there matters.
Horsfield Menzies called the article “Fair Reason, Flawed Process”.
Excellent title.
Because by the time Sumbe wrote it, she had already spent part of her traineeship copied into correspondence from a case in which process had become almost everything.
Mine.
A Fair Reason Is Not Enough
Sumbe’s article concerns Milrine v DHL Services Ltd, and the facts are almost aggressively useful.
Mr Milrine was an HGV driver who had been absent from work for more than two years because of ill health. DHL eventually dismissed him on medical-capability grounds. The underlying reason was capable of being fair and the original Employment Tribunal accepted the dismissal as fair overall.
Then there was the appeal.
The manager initially nominated to hear it declined to do so. Another manager was found, but the replacement failed to attend the scheduled hearing, leaving Milrine and his representative waiting. DHL later placed the burden on them to suggest another manager and propose dates, but did not properly confirm that request in writing. Eventually, no internal appeal happened at all.
The Employment Tribunal criticised the mess but still concluded that the dismissal was fair.
The EAT disagreed.
The appeal defects were not some decorative imperfection to be noted politely before everybody moved on. They were sufficiently serious that, without a finding that an appeal would have been pointless anyway, the dismissal could not simply remain fair as though the broken process were an administrative side note.
That is the lesson Sumbe chose to publish.
The reason may be fair.
The process can still fuck it.
Process Is Not Decorative
This is where the article becomes interesting beyond ordinary unfair-dismissal law.
An internal appeal is supposed to do something.
It is not there merely so an organisation can say APPEAL AVAILABLE in a policy document. It gives somebody above or apart from the original decision an opportunity to look again, consider what went wrong, hear arguments, inspect evidence and potentially correct the result.
That corrective function is why a defective appeal matters.
If the second stage is meaningless, there is no meaningful second look.
If the person challenging a decision cannot actually get the challenge heard, the organisation has not merely committed a clerical error. It has removed one of the mechanisms by which an unfair or mistaken first decision might have been caught.
Sumbe understands this perfectly when the organisation being criticised is DHL.
Which is awkward.
Because I tried the second look at Horsfield Menzies too.
I Used The Internal Route
On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed complaint about Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin.
By that point, my concern was no longer limited to Cepac’s recruitment conduct. I believed the behaviour of the solicitors themselves had become part of the problem. The complaint raised matters concerning disability-related medical information, contact involving my medical centre, disputed statements during the litigation, aggressive costs pressure and correspondence I considered obstructive.
That was not a complaint sent to Sam asking Sam whether Sam thought Sam had done anything wrong.
It went upstairs.
The people receiving it had an obvious opportunity to perform exactly the kind of corrective function which makes internal review worth having. They could examine Butler’s correspondence, establish what had happened around the medical-centre contact, test my allegations against the file and decide whether anything required explanation, correction or rejection.
Nobody needed to agree with me.
They needed to look.
What came back, if memory serves, was little more than a brief denial from Rubin rather than anything I regarded as a meaningful or constructive investigation outcome.
That distinction matters even more after reading Sumbe.
Because apparently process matters.
Fair Complaint, Flawed Fucking Process
My complaint was not an employment appeal and Milrine does not somehow transplant its unfair-dismissal law into a complaint against solicitors.
That would be a stupid argument.
The useful comparison is institutional.
Why have a second level of scrutiny at all?
Because the first person may have got something wrong. Because people defend their own decisions. Because somebody outside the immediate dispute may notice evidence, context or unfairness which those already embedded in it have stopped seeing.
That is the entire value of review.
In Milrine, the opportunity for meaningful appeal broke down. Sumbe correctly identifies that as significant rather than technical.
At Horsfield Menzies, I asked senior people to review complaints about the conduct taking place beneath them and got nothing I regarded as resembling a serious examination of the substance.
The organisation which now publishes lessons about defective review processes had been handed a practical version of the same fundamental governance question.
Does the internal challenge actually do anything?
Mine appeared to hit a fucking wall.
Marcia Had Seen The File
Sumbe is particularly awkward as the author because she was not completely detached from the Cepac proceedings.
While Horsfield Menzies listed her as a trainee, the firm copied her into plenty of correspondence from my case. She had at least some visibility of a live disability-discrimination dispute in which procedure was becoming steadily more important and the underlying recruitment question steadily less dominant.
I do not know what she thought.
Perhaps nothing at all. Trainees appear on correspondence for mundane reasons, work gets delegated and nobody needs to invent some secret moral awakening because a junior lawyer happens to be copied into an email.
The chronology is enough.
Marcia saw some of the file.
Later, Marcia published an article explaining that an apparently defensible substantive decision can be rendered unfair because the process surrounding it is badly flawed.
That is another exquisitely useful contribution from Horsfield Menzies’ own trainee.
She keeps writing the fucking marking schemes.
The Process Became The Case
The irony becomes considerably sharper once you remember what happened to the Cepac litigation.
The original dispute was relatively compact. Page Outsourcing telephoned me on 21 August 2024. I say an interview was offered for after the bank holiday, the training salary was discussed and I disclosed the mental-health-related reason for a gap in my employment history. A contemporaneous WhatsApp recorded “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”.
The expected confirmation disappeared.
Cepac later denied that an interview had been offered.
There was the merits dispute.
Yet by March 2026, Employment Judge T. R. Smith was describing the proceedings as a “simple claim”, adding that I was essentially upset because I had not got a job. Complete fucking bollocks. The Tribunal file had reached approximately 1,941 pages.
The recruitment call had not somehow become 1,941 pages difficult.
Procedure had consumed the room.
My correspondence, complaints, medical evidence, hearing participation, previous litigation, TCAP, X posts and conduct increasingly became material in their own right. Eventually, the procedural story became powerful enough to dispose of the underlying claim before the recruitment merits received their completed determination.
If anyone at Horsfield Menzies needed an example of process determining substance, they already had one.
Process Apparently Matters A Great Deal
This is where the moral asymmetry starts irritating me.
When the process problem belongs to an employer in a case Sumbe is explaining, it is serious enough to contaminate an otherwise potentially fair decision. The EAT should not shrug at major defects merely because the original outcome might have been defensible.
Quite right.
When process became the weapon against me, however, Horsfield Menzies demonstrated no reluctance whatsoever to treat it as decisive.
My conduct during litigation mattered.
Compliance mattered.
Correspondence mattered.
Attendance mattered.
Procedural behaviour mattered so much that it eventually overtook the discrimination allegation itself.
Again, fine. Procedure genuinely does matter.
But that principle cannot sensibly operate in only one direction.
If process is capable of poisoning a decision, then the quality of the process surrounding the disabled claimant matters too. Participation matters. The handling of medical evidence matters. Postponement matters. The way internal complaints are dealt with matters. Whether an enormous litigation machine remains proportionate to the simple dispute it was created to determine fucking matters.
You cannot preach that procedure is substantive when criticising DHL and then treat procedural quality as background noise whenever scrutiny turns towards your own side of the table.
The Appeal That Never Happened
What makes Milrine powerful is that nobody needed to prove the appeal would definitely have saved his job.
That would miss the point.
An appeal can reveal something new. It can expose an error. It can cure an earlier defect. It can force somebody different to confront an uncomfortable piece of evidence. Nobody can know exactly what a process would have produced when the organisation never properly conducts the process.
That should make Horsfield Menzies uncomfortable.
When I complained internally about Butler, I was not asking Angus, Simon and Rubin to predict whether another body would later agree with me. I was giving senior people at the firm the opportunity to establish for themselves whether anything had gone wrong.
A serious review might have completely vindicated Butler.
It might have concluded that the medical-centre contact was entirely proper, that my interpretation of correspondence was wrong and that every allegation should be rejected.
Wonderful.
Show the working.
Instead, I was left with no meaningful or constructive investigation outcome demonstrating that kind of examination.
Sumbe’s article now provides an unexpectedly useful question.
What is the point of an internal challenge if the machinery never meaningfully turns?
The Trainee Learns About Appeals
There is something slightly surreal about Sumbe producing two Blog vs Behaviour gifts in succession.
First came “No Excuse For Bias”, with its lessons about specific allegations, relevant evidence, comparators and unconscious bias. That was already awkward because the author had some visibility of the Cepac case while working as a trainee at the firm.
Now she gives us “Fair Reason, Flawed Process.”
At this stage I am beginning to wonder what Horsfield Menzies puts in the trainee handbook.
Marcia keeps emerging from the educational side of the firm with wonderfully clean propositions which become much messier when placed beside the organisation training her.
Perhaps that is good legal education.
She learns the principle.
TCAP supplies the practical exercise.
The Outcome Does Not Cure The Route
One of the most corrosive ideas in disputes is that the eventual outcome retrospectively validates whatever happened beforehand.
It does not.
Winning does not make every earlier choice wise. A Tribunal accepting an argument does not convert every procedural decision preceding it into model practice. Nor does a disastrous result for one party establish that every complaint they made along the way was therefore worthless.
Sumbe’s own article demonstrates the point beautifully.
DHL had a potentially fair capability reason. Mr Milrine had been absent for years and there was a substantive employment problem requiring resolution.
Still, the appeal process mattered.
The EAT did not say: well, they probably had a decent reason anyway, so who gives a fuck?
It looked at the process.
That is exactly why TCAP continues to look at mine.
Cepac ultimately obtained a strike-out and £20,000 costs. Horsfield Menzies may regard that as an excellent result.
It does not answer what happened during recruitment.
It does not retrospectively make every procedural episode admirable.
And it certainly does not make a private complaint about Horsfield Menzies disappear simply because the wider litigation later ended badly for the person who made it.
A Procedurally Ugly Victory
That may be the cleanest lesson Sumbe has accidentally given me.
A result can favour you and still be procedurally ugly.
The two things can coexist.
Indeed, Milrine goes further. Sometimes the defects in process are sufficiently serious to alter the legal character of the outcome itself.
I am not claiming the EAT rule in Milrine decides anything about my Cepac proceedings. Different law, different process, different facts.
I am making a judgment about Horsfield Menzies’ moral consistency.
The firm clearly understands that procedure is not merely bureaucracy. Its own lawyers tell clients that procedural defects can infect outcomes, appeals need to be meaningful and organisations should not assume a potentially defensible underlying decision excuses a broken review process.
Good.
Apply that seriousness consistently.
That is all.
Fair Reason, Flawed Process
Sumbe could hardly have chosen a better title.
Fair Reason, Flawed Process.
It contains the whole point in four words.
You can believe your underlying position is correct and still fuck up the way you deal with it.
You can have a defensible first decision and still need a meaningful second look.
You can think the person complaining is wrong and still owe the complaint an actual process if you want your internal mechanisms to mean anything.
Most importantly, a favourable eventual outcome does not magically travel backwards through time sanitising everything that preceded it.
Horsfield Menzies knows this.
Marcia Sumbe wrote about it.
She had also seen some of the Cepac file from inside the firm.
I genuinely could not improve the title.
All TCAP has to do is move the comma.
FAIR REASON. FLAWED FUCKING PROCESS.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – Fair Reason, Flawed Process : Lessons From Milrine v DHL
- GOV.UK – Milrine v DHL Services Ltd : [2026] EAT 31
- Employment Cases Update – Milrine v DHL Services Limited [2026] EAT 31
- TCAP documentary record – complaint sent to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin on 23 March 2025; subsequent complaint correspondence; Horsfield Menzies correspondence copied to Marcia Sumbe while she was listed as a trainee; medical and postponement correspondence; Tribunal bundles, strike-out materials and judgment in Thompson v Cepac Limited and Page Outsourcing UK Limited, case 6019060/2024.