Rachel Yorke Horsfield Menzies : The Threat Is Part Of The Product

Rachel Yorke has already told the Horsfield Menzies readership that Tribunal delay can operate attritionally and “grind down a claimant”. Apparently that was only one aisle in the pressure supermarket.

In “A WARNING FOR CLAIMANTS… DON’T BE A JOKER!”, Rachel moves from time to money. The article begins with a claimant whose conduct ended in a £12,500 costs order, explains the Tribunal’s power to award costs in appropriate cases and then arrives at the part worth putting under a fucking microscope. Horsfield Menzies, Yorke says, has secured costs for respondent clients on “numerous occasions”. Employers should put claimants on notice early that costs may follow if the relevant conduct continues or an unmeritorious case is pursued and lost. Better still, on occasion the warning itself can persuade a “half-hearted claimant” to withdraw.

There it is.

The interesting product is no longer simply the costs order.

It is the fear of one.

The Bill Does Not Even Have To Arrive

There is nothing inherently improper about a solicitor warning an opponent about genuine costs exposure. Quite the opposite. If a party is behaving unreasonably, pursuing something hopeless or creating needless expense, telling them where that road may end can be responsible litigation conduct. Employment Tribunal costs rules exist, and pretending otherwise would be idiotic.

Yorke, however, does not stop at explaining the law. She advertises the warning’s behavioural utility. Sometimes, she says, putting the claimant on notice can itself persuade them to withdraw.

That changes the character of the discussion.

The Tribunal has not yet awarded anything. Nobody has necessarily established the costs threshold. No judge has decided what conduct deserves sanction, what amount should follow or whether the claimant’s means matter. Nevertheless, the prospect of a future bill can already start doing useful work for the respondent.

That is why THE THREAT IS PART OF THE PRODUCT is not hyperbole.

The product does not merely compensate the employer after winning.

Sometimes the possibility of the product helps empty the courtroom before anyone reaches the fucking merits.

“Half-Hearted” Is Doing Some Heavy Lifting

The phrase “half-hearted claimant” deserves its own autopsy because it sneaks a moral conclusion into what may simply be a financial decision.

A claimant can believe every word of their case and still withdraw after receiving a costs warning. They may have no solicitor, little savings and no appetite for gambling £10,000, £20,000 or more against an employer with vastly deeper pockets. They may have a disability, unstable income, children, rent, debt or simply enough common sense to recognise that conviction does not pay an adverse order.

None of that makes them half-hearted.

It makes them exposed.

That distinction matters because the warning works most effectively where the financial asymmetry already exists. A corporation can spend five figures defending litigation and call it legal spend. An individual contemplating the same sum may see six months of income disappearing into a solicitor’s client account.

Yorke’s wording quietly converts that inequality into a character test. Stay in the case despite the threat and perhaps you were serious. Leave because the downside could fuck your finances for years and apparently your heart was never really in it.

What a convenient little morality play for the side holding the invoice.

The House Has Better Credit

Employment litigation is not a casino, but costs pressure introduces something very much like table stakes.

The respondent often begins with lawyers, HR staff, documents, corporate insurance arrangements or at least a business capable of budgeting for litigation. The claimant may begin with an ET1 and Google.

That imbalance does not make the employer wrong. It does, however, make the behavioural effect of a costs warning blindingly obvious. Tell both parties there may eventually be a £20,000 downside and the number means different things on opposite sides of the table.

For one participant, it may be a line in an annual legal budget.

For the other, it may be catastrophe.

So when an employer-side firm publicly notes that an early warning can make somebody withdraw, we are no longer discussing costs purely as post-event compensation. We are discussing leverage generated by unequal tolerance for risk.

The house does not have to rig the cards.

It already brought the bigger fucking wallet.

Rachel’s Joker Has A Useful Function

Yorke builds her piece around Stephen Lwanga v AtkinsRéalis Ltd, where the claimant’s conduct apparently provided the kind of example every respondent lawyer dreams of when writing a costs article. His claims failed, his Tribunal behaviour attracted severe criticism and a £12,500 order followed.

Fine.

If someone conducts litigation appallingly and satisfies the legal test for costs, a Tribunal can make an order. There is nothing scandalous about that proposition.

What makes Yorke’s piece revealing is the jump from here is an extreme case where costs were awarded to warn claimants early because sometimes the warning itself makes them go away.

Those are different propositions.

The first concerns sanction and compensation after conduct meets a legal threshold.

The second concerns pressure before the Tribunal has necessarily decided anything.

That second proposition tells you far more about the respondent-side mindset than the solitaire anecdote ever could.

The cards are decorative.

The leverage is the story.

And Then There Was Cepac

Horsfield Menzies did not merely write theoretically about costs while representing Cepac in my discrimination claim.

A costs application entered the actual proceedings.

The public judgment records that Cepac’s costs application had been notified to the Tribunal by 8 May 2025. It then remained part of the procedural landscape alongside the strike-out application as the litigation moved through case management, further hearings, disclosure directions, extensive evidence schedules and eventually the April 2026 public preliminary hearing.

That is nearly a year with a price tag hanging over the proceedings.

By the end, the main bundle had reached 1,657 pages excluding the index, plus a 136-page authorities bundle. Horsfield Menzies had assembled extensive material from my communications, blog posts and X activity to support Cepac’s strike-out case. The April hearing proceeded without me, the Tribunal struck out the claims on conduct grounds and Cepac obtained costs.

The original recruitment discrimination issues never received a completed merits determination.

Then came the bill.

Twenty Grand, Less Than Half The Actual Costs

Cepac ultimately limited its application to £20,000, thereby avoiding a detailed assessment. The judgment records that this figure represented less than half the costs actually incurred.

The Tribunal awarded the full £20,000.

There is an almost grotesque symmetry between Yorke’s marketing copy and the litigation record. Her article explains that Horsfield Menzies knows how to obtain costs for respondents, recommends early warning and openly identifies claimant withdrawal as one possible benefit of that warning. In my case, the same firm represented a respondent whose costs application became part of the proceedings by May 2025 and ultimately ended in the maximum specified £20,000 award available without detailed assessment.

That does not prove some secret instruction saying scare Thompson until he drops it.

It does not need to.

Blog vs Behaviour works best when Horsfield Menzies supplies the behavioural philosophy itself.

Rachel has done exactly that.

The Law Says Compensation. The Marketing Says Leverage

There is an important distinction buried inside the judgment itself.

Employment Tribunal costs exist to compensate the receiving party, not punish the paying party. That is the legal function.

Yorke’s article, however, describes a separate practical effect before an award ever exists: the warning can influence whether the claimant keeps going.

So the order may be compensatory in law while the prospect of the order operates coercively in practice.

That is not contradictory. It is precisely why the article is interesting.

A fire extinguisher exists to put out fires. Hang it over somebody’s head and it acquires another use.

Likewise, the fact that a costs regime has a legitimate compensatory purpose does not prevent the risk of costs becoming litigation leverage. Yorke practically says so herself when she celebrates the possibility that warning alone may secure withdrawal.

The legal rule provides the mechanism.

The fear provides the pressure.

Horsfield Menzies sells expertise in both.

First Grind Them Down, Then Show Them The Bill

Taken beside Yorke’s other article, the pattern becomes far uglier.

In one piece, Tribunal delays may operate attritionally as a tactic capable of grinding down a claimant.

In another, an early costs warning may persuade a claimant to withdraw.

These are not identical subjects, but they share the same behavioural logic. Neither mechanism proves the employer’s defence. Instead, each can alter whether the claimant remains willing or able to pursue the fight long enough for somebody to decide the underlying dispute.

Time attacks endurance.

Costs attack risk tolerance.

Put the two together and you have a litigation environment in which the merits can sit quietly in the waiting room while pressure works reception.

That is the part I find genuinely revolting.

A justice system should decide whether the claimant is right.

It should not reward whoever can make continuing sufficiently miserable first.

The Warning Letter As Bouncer

A costs warning can perform a peculiar gatekeeping function.

It does not physically prevent the claimant from proceeding. Nobody locks the Tribunal door. Instead, it stands beside the entrance and explains what might happen to your bank balance if you walk through.

For a represented corporate respondent, that warning may simply become correspondence for the litigation file.

For an unrepresented individual, it can dominate the entire case.

Suddenly every email becomes potentially expensive. Every application carries imagined financial consequences. Every disagreement with the respondent’s solicitors starts looking like another paragraph in a future costs schedule.

The claimant has not lost.

The Tribunal has not found the case hopeless.

No costs order exists.

Yet the warning is already collecting interest inside the claimant’s head.

Yorke calls the person who backs away half-hearted.

I would call the mechanism exactly what her article demonstrates: pressure.

This Is Not A Defence Of Shit Litigation

None of this requires romanticising claimants who behave atrociously or pursue obvious nonsense.

Tribunals need tools to control abusive proceedings. Respondents should not have to spend unlimited money answering claims with no reasonable prospect of success. If someone behaves vexatiously, disruptively or otherwise unreasonably, the rules provide consequences for good reason.

That is not the argument.

The argument concerns what happens when a legitimate sanction becomes a strategic warning capable of producing an outcome before the Tribunal has adjudicated the substantive claim.

Yorke herself supplies that distinction because she does not merely say warn them because fairness requires notice before seeking costs later. She goes on to identify withdrawal as a useful possible consequence.

That is the bit with teeth.

The warning is not merely informational.

It can be outcome-producing.

A Claimant Can Be Broke And Right

This point should be obvious, yet the phrase half-hearted claimant obscures it beautifully.

Financial resilience tells you almost nothing about legal merit.

A claimant with £200 in the bank can possess an excellent case. A multinational employer with ten law firms on speed dial can possess a dreadful defence. Justice is supposed to sort those questions through evidence and law rather than asking which side can afford to sit in the building longest.

Costs pressure distorts that ideal because people make rational decisions under uncertainty.

An individual may calculate that even a 70 per cent chance of winning does not justify a 30 per cent chance of owing a sum capable of wrecking their finances. Withdrawal under those circumstances tells you nothing about whether the original allegation was true.

It tells you the downside became intolerable.

Calling that claimant half-hearted is therefore a smug little sleight of hand.

Their heart may be fully in it.

Their mortgage company simply does not accept courage as fucking currency.

My Merits Never Got Their Day

That distinction lands particularly hard in the Cepac litigation because the £20,000 costs award did not follow a completed final determination rejecting the underlying recruitment discrimination allegations on their merits.

The Tribunal struck out the claims because of its findings about my conduct of the proceedings. The judgment itself recognised the consequence: I lost the opportunity to have the substantive issues tried.

That outcome remains subject to my continuing challenge, but the immediate historical fact is simple. The litigation ended on conduct and costs before the original recruitment dispute reached a full merits judgment.

Horsfield Menzies therefore got the kind of result Yorke’s wider costs philosophy makes especially interesting.

The client did not need to defeat the discrimination allegations after hearing all the substantive evidence.

The proceedings ended another way.

Then the claimant owed £20,000.

If you write articles explaining how pressure mechanisms can make claimants withdraw, perhaps do not act surprised when someone later examines what your own pressure architecture looked like in practice.

“Numerous Occasions” Is Quite The Sales Line

Yorke also makes sure potential clients know Horsfield Menzies has secured costs for respondents on “numerous occasions”.

That sentence is doing business development.

The firm is not merely explaining Tribunal procedure. It is advertising competence in making claimants pay.

Again, nothing improper about winning a lawful costs order. If the legal test is satisfied, clients are entitled to ask.

But combine that boast with the advice to warn early because the warning itself may secure withdrawal and the service begins to look broader than post-litigation recovery.

Horsfield Menzies can help defend the case.

It can pursue costs.

It knows when to put the claimant on notice.

And, according to Rachel, sometimes that alone is enough to make the other bastard leave.

That is not just a legal remedy.

That is a pressure product with a success story attached.

The Threat Works Best Before Anyone Knows The Answer

There is another reason early costs pressure deserves scrutiny.

At the beginning of litigation, uncertainty is at its highest.

Disclosure may not have completed. Witness evidence may not have been tested. Contradictions may remain unresolved and the Tribunal may have made no finding whatsoever on the contested facts.

That is precisely when the individual knows least about their eventual prospects and may feel most vulnerable to a warning drafted by specialist solicitors acting for a corporate respondent.

The employer has lawyers telling it what the risk probably means.

The litigant in person has the threat.

Consequently, the psychological weight of the letter can exceed its objective legal significance. A solicitor may know perfectly well that costs remain discretionary and exceptional. A frightened claimant may simply see YOU COULD OWE US THOUSANDS in professional prose.

You do not need to misstate the law for leverage to exist.

Typography and inequality can do the dirty work perfectly well.

The Joker Might Be The Marketing Department

Yorke’s headline tells claimants not to be jokers because her case study involved a claimant playing Solitaire while judgment was delivered.

Cute.

But the uglier joke sits further down the page.

The legal profession spends enormous energy insisting that costs orders are exceptional, discretionary and grounded in defined rules. Then an employer-side firm turns around and openly tells prospective clients that putting the claimant on notice early can sometimes make them withdraw.

The sanction is exceptional.

The warning is useful precisely because the claimant fears the exception.

That is the product.

You do not need a guaranteed costs order if the possibility of one produces the desired commercial result.

The joke, therefore, is not a deck of cards in a Tribunal room.

It is pretending the threat is merely neutral information when your own article celebrates what the threat can fucking accomplish.

THE THREAT IS PART OF THE PRODUCT

Rachel Yorke’s article begins as a cautionary story about unreasonable litigation conduct and ends by revealing something much more interesting about respondent-side legal strategy.

Costs can compensate an employer where the Tribunal decides the legal threshold has been crossed. Fine.

Horsfield Menzies has apparently secured those orders many times. Fine again.

But Yorke then tells employers to put claimants on notice early and acknowledges that, sometimes, the warning alone can induce withdrawal.

That is where the brochure slips.

The claimant does not have to lose the costs application for the threat to work.

The Tribunal does not have to quantify anything.

The respondent may never need to collect a penny.

All that needs to happen is for the person on the receiving end to look at the possible bill, look at their bank account and decide that continuing the case is too dangerous.

That is not proof that they were half-hearted.

It is proof that pressure works.

In my Cepac litigation, Horsfield Menzies represented the respondent while a costs application remained in the proceedings for nearly a year. The eventual hearing ended without a determination of the recruitment discrimination merits and produced a £20,000 order, which the judgment records as less than half the costs Cepac had actually incurred.

A few articles away on the Horsfield Menzies website, Rachel Yorke explains the behavioural value of telling claimants early that costs may be coming.

First, delay can grind them down.

Then, apparently, show them the possible bill.

Perhaps they withdraw.

Perhaps they do not.

Either way, the firm has told us what the pressure is capable of doing.

So spare me the fucking Joker routine.

The threat is not merely hanging beside the product.

The threat is part of the product.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Horsfield Menzies – Blog vs Behaviour : RACHEL YORKE – THE THREAT IS PART OF THE PRODUCT