Rachel Yorke has managed to fit one of the grubbiest sentences I have seen on an employment law firm’s website into what otherwise presents itself as a brisk annual review. Writing about an Employment Tribunal system buckling under delay, cancellations and hearings listed years into the future, she observes that “the delays can be used in an attritional way as a tactic to grind down a claimant.” Not suffered. Not regretted. Not merely endured. Used. As a tactic. To grind down a claimant.
That sentence is the spine of this article because it deserves considerably more than a raised eyebrow before everybody wanders off to the next employment-law update. There is something genuinely rancid about a professional legal culture that can look at a failing public justice system and see not merely a problem to navigate, but a resource somebody might exploit against the person bringing the claim. The Tribunal is drowning, hearings disappear from lists, litigants wait years for resolution and somebody apparently notices one tactical advantage: perhaps the delay will exhaust the bastard first.
TCAP does not need to translate a lawyerly euphemism into something uglier here. Yorke did the work herself.
The Sentence Under The Brochure
Most of Yorke’s article contains ordinary employment-law housekeeping. She discusses ACAS pressures, longer Early Conciliation, commercial settlement, harassment, neonatal leave, neurodiversity and the miserable condition of the Tribunal system. Employers should preserve witness evidence early, assess risk sensibly and consider resolving cases where the commercial exposure outweighs the merits of continuing the fight.
Then the varnish comes off.
Yorke describes judges disappearing from hearings, claims taking too long to reach respondents, final hearings sitting more than two years away and parts of the system struggling under a lack of employment-law experience. In other words, the machinery is jammed, the queue is obscene and people asking the state to determine their legal rights may spend years living inside unresolved disputes.
At that point, the obvious response might be outrage at the damage. Instead, Yorke notes that parties can use the delay “in an attritional way as a tactic to grind down a claimant.”
There is your glimpse behind the reception desk.
The brochure talks about justice, fairness and resolution. The operating manual notices that the queue itself can become a weapon.
That is not sophisticated advocacy.
That is legal-system scavenging.
Attrition Is A Polite Word For Making Somebody Too Tired To Continue
“Attrition” sounds respectable because lawyers adore a noun that can wear a tie. Strip off the tailoring and the concept becomes brutally simple: make continuing more painful than surrendering.
Time costs money. Delay consumes attention. Memories deteriorate, witnesses disappear and unresolved litigation occupies mental space long after everybody else has closed Outlook for the evening. For an individual claimant, the burden can also involve unemployment, disability, financial insecurity, damaged confidence and years of having a legal dispute humming permanently in the background like a smoke alarm with a dying battery.
Yorke’s phrase “grind down a claimant” therefore describes the human asymmetry with unusual frankness. A corporate respondent may have HR staff, insurers, external solicitors, established budgets and managers whose involvement occupies a few hours before they return to their normal jobs. The claimant may have one laptop, one nervous system and whatever money remains after the fucking rent.
Those are not equivalent reserves.
Viewing institutional delay through the lens of attritional opportunity takes a defect in access to justice and asks how much tactical value can be wrung out of it.
That is not advocacy at its best.
It is picking coins out of the wreckage.
First Empathise With The Claimant, Then Grind Them Down
The tonal whiplash inside Yorke’s article is almost artistic. Earlier, while discussing ACAS Early Conciliation, she talks about good conciliators empathising with claimants while understanding the case and challenging weak claims when necessary. Perfectly reasonable.
A few sections later, the system’s delay offers an opportunity to grind down a claimant.
Empathy apparently has a surprisingly short warranty.
That pairing captures one of the recurring Horsfield Menzies problems documented throughout Blog vs Behaviour. The language of fairness, understanding and support looks immaculate on the public-facing side of the firm. Dig a little deeper into the practical commentary and a colder operating vocabulary appears: leverage, risk, pressure, positioning, costs, evidence and now attrition.
None of those concepts is alien to litigation. Nor should solicitors pretend that legal disputes constitute group therapy. Their job is to advance the client’s lawful interests robustly.
However, there is a canyon between robust representation and looking at a malfunctioning justice system as a convenient means of exhausting the person standing on the other side.
One is adversarial law.
The other smells like the fucking drains.
A Broken Tribunal Is Not An Employer Benefit
Yorke is right about the Tribunal system struggling, and that makes the attrition remark worse rather than better. When a lack of judges causes hearings to collapse, the justice system has failed. Long delays in serving claims represent another failure, while final hearings listed years into the future weaken confidence in a forum that exists because workplace rights mean bugger all if people cannot enforce them before the evidence, money or human stamina runs out.
Employer-side solicitors obviously need to advise clients about the practical consequences. They should preserve evidence, keep track of witnesses, reassess commercial risk and tell businesses what a long timetable means for defending the case.
That is sensible lawyering.
Looking at the same delay and observing that it can help because prolonged proceedings might wear down the claimant occupies a very different moral postcode. Now the state’s inability to provide timely justice has become private bargaining leverage.
Government fails to maintain the road, and somebody at the roadside starts charging stranded motorists for water.
That is the fucking problem.
Then There Was My “Simple Claim”
My Cepac case began with a recruitment dispute. Page Outsourcing telephoned about a production role, I disclosed the mental-health-related reason for a gap in employment, and I understood that the recruiter had offered an interview for after the bank holiday. A contemporaneous WhatsApp sent that day recorded “Interview next week” alongside the salary discussion. Cepac later denied that anybody had offered me an interview.
That was the factual core.
By April 2026, the main hearing bundle contained 1,657 pages excluding the index, alongside a 136-page authorities bundle. Cepac relied heavily on material drawn from my communications, blog posts and X activity when pursuing strike-out. The Tribunal ultimately struck out the claims because of its findings about my conduct of the proceedings and ordered £20,000 costs in Cepac’s favour. Nobody completed a final merits determination of the original recruitment dispute.
A contested recruitment call had mutated into an enormous procedural machine.
I do not need to invent a secret Horsfield Menzies attrition conspiracy to make Yorke’s sentence relevant. The procedural history already supplies the context. I know what litigation feels like when the event that brought you to Tribunal becomes increasingly obscured by participation disputes, applications, postponements, correspondence, bundles, costs arguments and allegations about conduct.
Then a Horsfield Menzies lawyer publishes the words “grind down a claimant.”
You can understand why TCAP’s ears prick up.
When Process Becomes The Punishment
There is an old description of institutional conflict: the process is the punishment. Yorke’s line wanders uncomfortably close to explaining how civil litigation can achieve that result without anybody ever needing to write a villainous strategy document.
Nobody needs to win every procedural fight if the cumulative burden makes the opposing party less capable of continuing. Delay, paperwork, cost exposure, uncertainty and repeated conflict generate pressure all by themselves. The darker feature is that institutions usually possess much deeper reserves for absorbing that pressure than individual people do.
A company can replace an HR director halfway through proceedings and carry on. If one solicitor leaves, another opens the file. Legal fees enter a budget, while contracts can require former employees to assist with proceedings after departure, a device Yorke herself discusses elsewhere in the article.
Nobody replaces the claimant.
There is no spare nervous system sitting in Accounts waiting to take over.
If the individual becomes exhausted, frightened, financially stretched or unwell, the case remains theirs. That is why grind them down is not simply a colourful turn of phrase. The tactic derives its power from an inequality of endurance.
And Then They Write About Disability Adjustments
The article becomes even more grotesque because Yorke discusses disability and neurodiversity in the same annual review. She advises managers to recognise when people struggle, involve HR or occupational health and tailor adjustments to the individual.
Good.
A little further down the page, delay in the Tribunal system apparently offers an attritional mechanism capable of grinding down a claimant.
No neat doctrinal contradiction exists between those passages. One concerns workplace management and another concerns litigation dynamics. They address different legal questions.
Morally, however, the juxtaposition is fucking septic.
The same professional voice understands that disabled and neurodivergent people may require individually tailored support, while also recognising that prolonged litigation can wear claimants down. Put a disabled litigant in person into that equation and the theory stops looking abstract very quickly.
Someone already dealing with anxiety, emotional dysregulation, executive-function problems, panic or difficulty participating under stress does not experience years of litigation as a neutral scheduling inconvenience. The burden can interact directly with the impairment itself.
A law firm sophisticated enough to sell clients advice about that reality is sophisticated enough to understand exactly what attrition can do.
That is what makes the sentence so foul.
The £20,000 Exit Sign
Costs pressure deserves a place beside this because money is attrition’s uglier cousin. Employment Tribunals do not ordinarily follow the conventional civil-court rule that the loser pays the winner’s costs, but they can make substantial orders where the statutory tests apply. My case ended with a £20,000 costs order in Cepac’s favour.
Long before the final order, costs already formed part of the atmosphere surrounding the litigation.
That matters because financial threats influence behaviour before anyone pays a penny. A litigant in person facing the possibility of a substantial adverse order does not assess legal merit in isolation. They think about debt, savings, benefits, rent, personal exposure and whether one more procedural fight might leave them financially fucked.
Lawyers can properly warn an opponent about potential costs consequences. Respondents also have every right to protect themselves against unreasonable litigation conduct.
However, once the firm’s own website acknowledges attrition as a means of grinding down a claimant, every pressure mechanism takes on a dirtier silhouette.
The interesting question stops being merely which tools exist?
It becomes what sort of professional culture decides how hard to lean on them?
Horsfield Menzies Says The Quiet Part With Excellent Grammar
This is becoming something of an occupational hazard for Horsfield Menzies.
Its writers produce perfectly serviceable legal commentary and then, every so often, one sentence escapes supervision and tells TCAP considerably more than the glossy website probably intended.
Fungus does it habitually.
Rachel Yorke has now joined the fucking orchestra.
The astonishing feature of “grind down a claimant” is how unnecessary the phrase was. Yorke could have said that delay affects settlement dynamics, increases pressure on both parties or changes commercial appetites over time.
All true.
All professional.
Instead, she identified an attritional tactic and then described its purpose in language requiring no translation whatsoever.
Grind down the claimant.
That is not TCAP turning neutral legal prose into something ugly.
That is Horsfield Menzies translating itself.
Do Not Blame The Queue While Using The Queue
One particularly contemptible form of institutional behaviour involves complaining about a broken system while simultaneously extracting value from the breakage.
Yorke spends this section explaining that the Tribunals are struggling.
Correct.
Several decent responses follow naturally. Demand more judicial capacity. Push for proportionate case management. Encourage early resolution. Warn clients that years of delay damage evidence, witnesses and both parties.
Instead, another practical possibility appears: use the delay to wear down the claimant.
Imagine complaining that the hospital lift has broken while quietly opening a business charging wheelchair users to be carried upstairs. The dysfunction has stopped being merely unfortunate.
Somebody has found a fucking commercial use for it.
That is what makes the attrition line so repellent. It does not simply acknowledge that claimants may become tired over time. It identifies that exhaustion as something capable of serving tactical ends.
This Is Why Claimants Stop Trusting The System
Lawyers sometimes appear surprised when litigants in person become suspicious of procedure. Articles like this explain part of the problem.
Imagine receiving repeated assurances that justice remains neutral, the parties should cooperate, delay harms everybody and professional representatives want efficient resolution. Then read an employer law firm casually noting that those same delays can operate as attritional leverage against you.
What conclusion should an ordinary claimant draw?
Perhaps everybody hates the delay but occasionally enjoys what it does to the other side. Maybe the system remains fair only if you possess the resources to survive it longer than your opponent. Perhaps a two-year listing represents a tragedy until the weaker party finally becomes desperate enough to settle.
People do not lose faith in legal institutions only because they dislike outcomes. They also lose faith when procedure begins looking less like a road to adjudication and more like another instrument of pressure.
Yorke’s sentence pours petrol directly onto that suspicion.
The Claim Should Be Tried, Not Survived
A very simple principle sits underneath all of this.
A claimant should win or lose because of the merits, the evidence and the law. The outcome should not depend on who can tolerate more correspondence, survive without money for longer or remain psychologically intact through years of unresolved proceedings.
Someone accepting fuck-all after two years because another twelve months feels unbearable does not prove the defence.
It proves endurance ran out.
Employers remain entitled to defend themselves robustly. Weak claims should fail. Tribunals can sanction abusive litigation conduct, strike out cases where the legal threshold exists and award costs where the rules justify doing so.
Attrition belongs in a different category.
It does not answer the claim.
It attacks the claimant’s ability to keep demanding an answer.
GRIND THEM DOWN
Rachel Yorke probably intended one practical observation inside a broad year-end review. Instead, she accidentally wrote the slogan for an entire philosophy of litigation.
“The delays can be used in an attritional way as a tactic to grind down a claimant.”
There it is.
A public justice system cannot provide timely hearings, so its failure itself becomes something a well-resourced respondent may exploit. Claimants wait while lawyers continue working, witness evidence gets preserved, commercial positions harden and the person who brought the case must somehow remain financially solvent, mentally intact and procedurally immaculate for however long the fucking machine decides to take.
Horsfield Menzies can call that practical realism.
TCAP sees something considerably uglier.
It is legal opportunism feeding on institutional failure: finding somebody trapped in the gears of a broken system and noticing that, if you leave them there long enough, the machinery may eventually do part of the work for you.
That is not justice.
That is grind them down.
And Rachel Yorke put it on the website herself.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project