Sam Butler has written a media-literacy lesson for people apparently too excitable to be trusted with Employment Tribunal headlines. His Horsfield Menzies article, “CLICKBAIT v CASE LAW”, warns that dramatic coverage can flatten complicated judgments into something misleading, encourage employees to draw conclusions which may not survive contact with the actual decision and leave managers frightened of enforcing perfectly legitimate workplace rules. Tribunals, Sam reminds everyone, care about “process, policies, and context”. First-instance decisions are usually fact-specific. Employers should therefore resist whatever hysterical bastardisation of employment law has just escaped into the newspapers and, naturally enough, “rely on expertise” instead.
It is all perfectly sensible, which is what makes the article irritating. Butler is not wrong that context matters; he is wrong only if he imagines Horsfield Menzies occupies some pristine intellectual territory outside the same processes of selection, compression and framing he finds so troubling in journalism. Newspaper editors choose the dramatic part of a case because drama attracts attention. Lawyers choose the parts of a record which best support the proposition they need to establish because that is how adversarial litigation works. One profession calls the result a headline. The other gives it a bundle index and charges by the hour. That distinction is legally important, but rhetorically it is nowhere near as fucking pure as Brochure Sam would like it to look.
Sam Butler Explains Reading
The title “CLICKBAIT v CASE LAW” tells you almost everything about the hierarchy Butler is constructing. On one side sits clickbait: crude, noisy, simplified and designed to attract attention. On the other sits case law: careful, contextual, technical and best interpreted by professionals who understand all the fiddly bits everyone else keeps fucking up. There is a slightly school-prefect quality to the whole thing, as if ordinary employees have been caught passing around a newspaper clipping at lunch and Sam has arrived to confiscate it before somebody accidentally develops an opinion.
The funny part is that Butler’s article is itself professional-services marketing using exactly the devices it warns against. It has a punchy adversarial title, identifies a threat, compresses a complex subject into digestible lessons and ends by pointing readers towards legal expertise. There is nothing improper about that. It is a business blog doing what a business blog is supposed to do. The hypocrisy becomes more interesting when simplification is presented as intellectually suspicious only when somebody else owns the fucking publishing platform. When the press compresses complexity, Sam calls it clickbait. When Horsfield Menzies compresses complexity into a blog explaining why you should instruct Horsfield Menzies, apparently we have reached thought leadership.
Beautiful.
The Real Anxiety Is Unlicensed Interpretation
The most revealing part of Butler’s piece is the concern that “expertise is overlooked”. Beneath all the talk about misleading headlines lies a familiar professional anxiety: people encounter legal information directly, misunderstand some of it and begin behaving as though they possess conclusions which have not been filtered through somebody qualified to tell them what the judgment really means. Employees may think they have rights they do not. Managers might become unnecessarily cautious. A newspaper story may start influencing workplace culture before an employment solicitor has had the opportunity to put the bloody thing back in its box.
Sam therefore recommends the sensible antidote: look at the actual facts, understand the process and take advice. The problem is that his principle does not stop being valid once the person constructing the narrative has a practising certificate. Lawyers do not become incapable of framing simply because the framing appears in submissions rather than a tabloid. They still select, emphasise, arrange and contextualise. Indeed, competent litigators do those things exceptionally well because their job is not to reproduce reality in neutral chronological sludge; it is to present the strongest legitimate version of their client’s case.
That is where Butler’s article becomes useful to TCAP. He wants readers to interrogate the distance between the headline and the underlying record. Fine. Let us apply the little bastard’s methodology properly.
Three Hundred And Thirty-One Tiny Headlines
By the end of the Cepac proceedings, Horsfield Menzies had helped construct an extensive documentary case around my conduct. The public judgment records 150 communications and blog entries and another 181 entries from X. Those materials sat within proceedings whose main hearing bundle eventually ran to 1,657 pages excluding the index, and Daniel Rubin took the Tribunal through numerous examples while advancing Cepac’s strike-out case.
None of that material was fake. I wrote the emails, published the articles and posted the tweets, but none of it materialised in a vacuum. It was produced during an escalating disability-discrimination dispute in which I was dealing with documented mental-health difficulties, repeated procedural conflict, participation problems, costs pressure and what I believed were serious failures in the way the litigation itself was being handled. Some of the language was aggressive because the dispute had become aggressive; some of it was profane because I was furious; and some of it reflected the emotional dysregulation under stress that my medical evidence had already identified. That does not magically make every word admirable, but it does mean the causal context mattered before 331 cherry-picked items were arranged into a broader story about the person who produced them.
That process is not far removed from the media mechanism Butler is criticising. A dramatic headline extracts one compelling feature from a messy factual record and makes it stand for the whole. Litigation evidence works differently in law but can produce a related narrative effect: one message becomes an example, repeated examples become a pattern and the pattern becomes an explanation of character or conduct. The more entries accumulate, the less anyone needs to say the headline out loud. Eventually it writes itself: the claimant is the problem.
Sam, of all people, should understand why that kind of compression deserves scrutiny.
Context For Me, Conduct For Thee
Butler specifically tells readers that Tribunals care about “process, policies, and context”, which is delightful because context became one of the central disputes running through my case. My position was not that disability gave me immunity from criticism or some magical licence to behave however the fuck I wanted. It was that the communications relied upon against me should be understood alongside documented mental-health difficulties, emotional dysregulation under stress, escalating procedural conflict, participation problems, medical evidence and my complaints about how the litigation itself was being conducted.
The Tribunal ultimately rejected that material as sufficient justification for the sustained conduct it condemned. That finding is part of the record and there is no need to vandalise it to make Butler’s article look awkward. The sharper point is that Sam’s own media-literacy lesson recognises the analytical stage which must occur before anybody reaches that conclusion. The reader still has to read, weigh and understand the surrounding context rather than silently allowing it to evaporate because the extracted material is more dramatic.
Context is not the same thing as excuse. A rude email can remain rude after you understand why somebody sent it, and an abusive post can remain abusive despite disability. Yet a professional who publicly warns everyone not to draw sweeping conclusions from dramatic fragments ought to appreciate why the circumstances surrounding those fragments remain relevant even when they do not ultimately save the person responsible.
Brochure Sam understands the principle perfectly. File Sam happened to work in a case where the fragments became fucking formidable.
The Boring Case Underneath The Spectacle
The original Cepac dispute was almost offensively mundane compared with what followed. Page Outsourcing telephoned me about a production job. I say an interview was offered after the bank holiday, salary was discussed and I explained that mental-health treatment accounted for the gap in my employment history. A same-day 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.
The factual questions arising from that were hardly cinematic. What did Page record during the call? Which information went to Cepac? When did my candidate status change, who made the decision and why did the accounts diverge? These are exactly the kind of dull evidential questions employment litigation exists to answer, and had the case remained there it would barely have generated enough glamour for a fucking local newspaper brief.
Then the litigation itself became the story. Medical evidence arrived, postponement battles developed, complaints multiplied, costs threats appeared, TCAP came into existence and my behaviour increasingly generated material in real time. The original recruitment event was fixed in the past, while the claimant continued producing emails, applications, blog posts and X content week after week.
That imbalance matters because fresh conduct is inherently more vivid than historic merits evidence. A disputed phone call from months earlier requires reconstruction. Yesterday’s angry post arrives timestamped and searchable with the word cunt sitting exactly where the lawyers left it. The claimant became considerably more clickable than the claim.
Brochure Sam Meets File Sam Again
This is not Butler’s first contribution to the recurring split between Horsfield Menzies’ public persona and its litigation record. Brochure Sam writes about dignity, equality and workplace fairness. File Sam appears in a case involving disability-related medical information, participation disputes and a sustained conduct argument. Brochure Sam writes about data protection and the stewardship of sensitive employee information, while File Sam features in the medical-centre episode where appointment availability became part of the respondent’s argument against postponement.
Now Brochure Sam is telling the world to resist sensational fragments, respect context and avoid swallowing dramatic headlines whole. File Sam worked inside proceedings where the respondent eventually presented hundreds of selected communications and public statements as evidence of how the claimant had conducted himself. That does not make the litigation strategy illegitimate. It makes the juxtaposition fucking irresistible.
The website version of Sam writes as though employment law is a seminar in balanced interpretation. The litigation version operates in the adversarial world where the purpose is to identify the strongest material available to the client and use it. I actually find File Sam more intellectually honest. Litigation is not a mindfulness retreat. Solicitors are there to advance their client’s position within professional rules, not to provide the opponent with a lovingly balanced documentary portrait suitable for framing.
What grates is the sanctimonious little halo Brochure Sam puts around context when talking about everybody else.
The Expertise Sales Funnel
There is something wonderfully commercial about the structure of “CLICKBAIT v CASE LAW”. First comes the threat: dramatic reporting is misleading people. Then comes uncertainty: employment law is highly fact-specific and managers may draw the wrong conclusions. Finally comes the solution: rely on expertise.
You have read something alarming. You probably do not fully understand it. Fortunately, Sam does.
Again, that is perfectly ordinary professional marketing. Accountants tell you tax is complicated, cybersecurity firms remind you hackers exist and employment solicitors explain why reading a Tribunal headline does not make you an employment solicitor. Everyone has to sell something.
The contempt creeps in when the article implies that framing is primarily a problem belonging to the amateurs. Professional interpretation also has incentives. A solicitor acts for a client. Arguments are constructed towards outcomes. Evidence receives weight according to relevance and strategic utility. The resulting narrative may be legally sophisticated, fully sourced and beautifully indexed, but it is still a narrative advanced by one side of a dispute.
The pagination does not turn advocacy into fucking gravity.
Some Context Arrives In A Better Suit
That difference in presentation becomes especially important when the other side is a litigant in person. An employee can read the press story and draw a conclusion; Sam says careful, you need the fuller picture. A claimant may explain the circumstances surrounding an angry communication, only for the respondent to argue that those circumstances do not justify the conduct. Meanwhile, the solicitor selects evidence and advances the interpretation most favourable to the client before the Tribunal ultimately decides between the competing accounts. Those are different functions, and Butler understands the hierarchy perfectly well.
Presentation itself carries power. That does not mean the lawyer is wrong or the litigant is right. It means Butler’s distinction between crude headlines and sophisticated context is incomplete unless he recognises that professionals also decide what the audience sees first, what gets repeated and which facts acquire narrative prominence.
My conduct material eventually arrived organised and searchable. My own explanations often arrived sprawling, furious and badly disciplined. There is no mystery which version is easier for a decision-maker to consume. The interesting question for Blog vs Behaviour is what happens when the man warning everyone about the dangers of simplistic interpretation works for the side capable of presenting its interpretation with the better tailoring.
Sam dislikes clickbait. Fair enough.
The legal world has always had nicer fucking stationery.
Clickbait With A Bundle Index
This is why the 331 entries matter beyond their sheer volume. Butler has supplied the vocabulary for interrogating the difference between factual accuracy and complete understanding. A headline may contain a true statement and still distort the significance of a case. Genuine quotations can look very different once restored to what preceded them, while even an accurate one-sentence description of a Tribunal judgment may be hopelessly inadequate as an account of its reasoning.
Exactly the same intellectual caution should apply whenever individual communications are used to construct a broader behavioural narrative. The email can be genuine and the X post appalling without either becoming the entire story. A blog paragraph may make everybody involved want to throw their laptop through a fucking window while the surrounding chronology still matters.
The Tribunal considered the wider record and reached its decision. That is important. My criticism is not that context was legally prohibited from being rejected; it is that Butler’s own writing recognises why the reduction from complicated record to compelling proposition requires scrutiny in the first place.
Journalism calls the resulting proposition a headline.
Litigation gives it a schedule.
Never Let The Boring Facts Ruin A Good Headline
The eventual outcome of the proceedings can itself be reduced into something Butler should instinctively distrust: disabled claimant behaves appallingly, case struck out, £20,000 costs awarded. Every important component of that sentence can be supported by the judgment, yet it still does not tell you the whole history. Whether Page originally offered the interview remained unresolved by a completed merits determination. The disputed recruitment chronology did not receive its final answer, nor did every question about the movement of health information. My later conduct also cannot retrospectively convert every complaint I made about Horsfield Menzies into nonsense or magically render every strategic decision during the litigation admirable.
What the judgment tells you, very clearly, is how the proceedings ended. Butler’s own article says intelligent readers should distinguish that eye-catching outcome from the detailed factual and procedural route underneath it. On that point, the irritating little prick is absolutely right.
Clickbait For Thee, Case Law For Me
That is ultimately why Butler’s article works so well for Blog vs Behaviour. Its legal advice is not particularly objectionable. It is the faintly superior posture around it which makes the thing so fucking ripe. The press simplifies, employees misunderstand, managers become frightened and experts restore perspective. Meanwhile, the professional legal system also works through selection, emphasis, narrative and strategic presentation, only with considerably more disciplined methods and somebody charging for the photocopying.
Butler is right about the central proposition: a headline is not a judgment. Process and context matter, while first-instance Employment Tribunal decisions are ordinarily fact-specific rather than universal commandments scratched into legal stone. None of that is controversial. His mistake is behaving as though those lessons travel only from the solicitor downwards, rather than remaining equally useful when somebody examines how the solicitor has framed the story.
So I followed Sam’s advice. I looked beyond the dramatic fragments, read the judgment, considered the process and put the 150 communications and blog entries, the 181 X entries and the 1,657-page bundle back beside the rather more boring dispute which started the whole bloody thing.
The result is not that the conduct disappears. It does not. What disappears is the pretence that the headline is the entire fucking newspaper.
And that seems an appropriate place to leave Sam Butler’s contribution to media literacy.
CLICKBAIT FOR THEE, CASE LAW FOR ME.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – Clickbait v Case Law
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cepac Limited and Page Outsourcing UK Limited: Judgment
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies: Brochure Sam vs File Sam
- TCAP – Sam Butler: Equality Clocks Off When Cepac Calls
- TCAP – Sam Butler: Flawed Process, Perfectly Billable
- TCAP – Sam Butler: The Medical Fishing Expedition