Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – Daniel Rubin : MAULED ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA

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Daniel Rubin once wrote approvingly about social media doing something genuinely useful: spotting institutional bullshit that the institution itself had somehow managed not to see. In “Dolly Babes and Leaders: a story of everyday sexism”, Rubin considers the backlash against Clarks after the company managed to sell girls’ shoes called “Dolly babe” alongside boys’ shoes called “Leader”. Social media noticed the stereotyping, the criticism spread and Rubin described it as “pleasing” that people were calling it out. His broader lesson was sensible enough: businesses should identify their own “pinch points for unconscious bias”, ensure equality of opportunity and understand that organisations seen doing nothing about discrimination can expect to be “mauled across social media”.

That is what makes this funny. Businesses should identify unconscious bias, and preferably for reasons other than spotting where the pressure points are. They should ensure equality of opportunity, interrogate the decisions that produce unequal outcomes and avoid burying their heads in the sand while somebody outside the building points at something everybody inside has become too accustomed to notice. Rubin’s answer to public criticism was not supposed to be panic, retaliation or hunting the critic. The whole point was that outside scrutiny can expose an internal blind spot that polite corporate processes missed.

Then social media pointed at Horsfield Menzies.

Years later, during disability-discrimination litigation involving its own client and criticism of its own conduct, Horsfield Menzies found itself on the receiving end of exactly the mechanism Rubin had described. TCAP wrote about the case. X posts criticised decisions, lawyers, evidence and procedural conduct. Public commentary began doing what public commentary does when somebody thinks an institution is behaving badly: making the dispute searchable, permanent and considerably harder to keep behind professional-services frosted glass. Horsfield Menzies’ response included assembling nearly two hundred pages of social-media material for use in the strike-out proceedings.

Rubin had warned organisations that they might be mauled across social media.

His firm printed the fucking mauling out.

Blog: Sometimes The Internet Sees What The Boardroom Misses

Rubin’s Clarks article works because he understands how institutional blindness develops. Nobody necessarily walks into the office announcing that today would be an excellent day to reinforce a stereotype. Decisions pass through ordinary meetings, approval processes and people who share enough assumptions that something ridiculous can reach the public carrying the company logo before anybody internally asks what it says about the organisation that produced it. Then somebody outside the building sees the finished product and asks, quite reasonably, how the hell it survived all those layers.

That is the useful role Rubin gives social media. It supplies an external pair of eyes which does not owe allegiance to the internal explanation, the management hierarchy or the people who signed the thing off. If an organisation has a blind spot, public criticism may expose it before another steering group can rename it an “opportunity for learning” and distribute a six-slide deck about values.

Rubin therefore tells organisations to identify their own “pinch points for unconscious bias”. That is a good phrase because it asks businesses to look at where decisions actually happen. Who receives the information, what assumptions enter the process, which person exercises discretion and where could bias alter the outcome? In a recruitment setting, those questions become particularly obvious: who screens the applicant, what gets recorded, what travels to the client, who shortlists and what does that decision-maker know when the candidate disappears from the process?

Those were almost exactly the questions at the heart of my Cepac claim. Page Outsourcing conducted the recruitment call. Health information entered the chronology. Cepac’s later pleaded position created arguments about knowledge. A contemporaneous WhatsApp recorded “Interview next week.” There was a defined chain through which information, decisions and explanations ought to have travelled, and a merits hearing should have tested it.

Yet the most energetic pinch-point investigation eventually concerned somebody else entirely.

Me.

Behaviour: The Private Version Came First

This is where the timeline makes Rubin’s old sermon considerably darker. Horsfield Menzies did not first learn that I had concerns about its conduct because somebody tagged Daniel Rubin in an angry post. Before much of the public criticism escalated, the firm received the private version.

On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed complaint concerning Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. It raised concerns about disability-related medical information, contact involving my medical centre, litigation statements, costs pressure and correspondence I regarded as obstructive. The following day, I chased the complaint and asked whether anybody intended to investigate it and when I could expect an outcome. Whatever brief response or denial followed, I did not receive a reasoned, structured investigation outcome explaining what Horsfield Menzies had examined, what evidence it considered and how it reached conclusions on the allegations.

That matters because Rubin’s article effectively tells organisations not to wait until the internet does the examination for them. Identify the problem internally, inspect the pinch point and deal with whatever the evidence shows. Horsfield Menzies had exactly that opportunity. The complaint was private, specific and sitting with senior people. Nobody needed to search X, Google TCAP or ask whether a reputational issue was brewing. The firm had the allegations before the algorithm had a fucking vote.

If Horsfield Menzies considered my complaint nonsense, it could have demonstrated that through a proper investigation and reasoned conclusion. If something required correction, it could have dealt with it quietly. Either route would have engaged with the underlying criticism rather than the person making it. Instead, the issues remained alive, the dispute became increasingly public and the social-media mauling Rubin had once treated as an external accountability mechanism duly arrived.

Then the institutional curiosity changed direction.

When Clarks Gets Mauled, Inspect Clarks

That is the core Blog vs Behaviour inversion. When Clarks was criticised, Rubin treated the social-media reaction as evidence worth taking seriously about Clarks. The organisation had approved the product names, so the organisation should examine its assumptions and the processes that allowed them through. The public criticism mattered because it potentially exposed something internal.

When Horsfield Menzies and its client faced sustained online criticism, however, the criticism itself increasingly became evidence about the critic. What had Thompson written? What language had he used? Who had he named? How many posts existed? What might the articles and tweets demonstrate about his conduct? Instead of the public commentary functioning principally as a prompt to examine the institution under criticism, the person producing it became an evidential project.

That is a completely different direction of travel. Rubin’s Clarks logic says: the internet is pointing at your organisation, so investigate what it is pointing at. The Cepac litigation increasingly looked like: the internet is pointing at us, so investigate the person holding the fucking finger out.

Nearly two hundred pages of social-media material make that reversal difficult to miss. Somebody had to collect it, organise it, convert it into something suitable for the litigation and place significance upon it. The online criticism had become sufficiently important to warrant substantial documentary treatment. Yet the complaint that preceded much of that criticism produced nothing remotely comparable for me by way of a structured investigation outcome.

The firm could document the critic in extraordinary detail.

Explaining what it had concluded about the criticism was apparently rather less urgent.

Unconscious Bias Is Not A Pressure Map

Rubin’s “pinch points” language becomes even more uncomfortable in a disability case because a pinch point is supposed to be somewhere an organisation recognises vulnerability in its own decision-making and installs a safeguard. The point is to prevent a protected characteristic from quietly altering how somebody is treated. You identify the weakness so that bias does not contaminate the outcome.

It should not become a tactical map.

Horsfield Menzies knew about my anxiety. It handled medical evidence. It became involved in disputes around appointments and participation. It knew that stressful situations could affect emotional regulation. At the same time, it knew exactly what I was alleging about the recruitment process and increasingly knew what I was alleging about the conduct of the litigation itself.

That knowledge could have produced institutional introspection. What part of this dispute is being driven by disability? Are our procedural choices increasing rather than reducing conflict? Did anything about the complaint concerning Butler require serious internal scrutiny? Is the public criticism identifying something uncomfortable but real?

Instead, the increasingly tangible product was the criticism itself. Posts and articles could be captured, indexed and deployed. The outward-facing material became useful in a way the inward-facing accusation apparently was not.

Rubin says businesses should identify the pinch points. TCAP would merely add that the idea is to remove the bias, Daniel, not circle the vulnerable spot in red ink and discover how much fucking leverage it offers.

Then They Printed The Internet

There is something wonderfully absurd about converting social media back into nearly two hundred pages of paper. The internet is fast, unstable and scattered across timelines, threads and websites. Legal proceedings domesticate it. Somebody captures the posts, paginates them, puts them into order and suddenly the same criticism that lived online is wearing office clothes.

That transformation matters psychologically as well as practically. A tweet on a screen is commentary. Put enough tweets into a bundle and the stack itself begins projecting authority. Paper has a strange old trick of making volume feel like weight. Two hundred pages look serious before anybody has asked whether the number of pages tells you anything meaningful about the underlying dispute.

The physical image is almost too perfect for Blog vs Behaviour. Rubin once warned organisations that they might be “mauled across social media” if they failed to deal with discrimination and bias. When the mauling eventually arrived closer to his own professional world, Horsfield Menzies helped capture it, dry it between sheets of A4 and carry it into litigation.

The accountability mechanism became an exhibit.

The critic became the evidential object.

The internet went into the printer and came back wearing a fucking tab number.

The Criticism Became More Useful Than The Complaint

There is an ugly efficiency to that reversal. A private complaint creates obligations, inconvenience and risk. Somebody has to look inward, ask colleagues awkward questions and perhaps discover that an allegation has some merit. Public criticism creates reputational discomfort, but once litigation is underway it can also become material capable of being redirected towards the complainant.

One requires an organisation to examine itself.

The other allows it to examine the person doing the examining.

That is why the sequence matters so much. My complaint concerning Butler existed first. The public criticism intensified afterwards. Yet the visible documentary industry became vastly more interested in preserving what I said publicly than producing an intelligible account of what Horsfield Menzies had concluded about its own conduct.

This is not about demanding that a law firm agree with hostile criticism simply because somebody publishes it. Rubin’s own Clarks article does not require that either. The point is curiosity. If outside criticism is valuable because it can expose blind spots, then the honest test arrives when the criticism concerns your own decisions and your own colleagues. Do you examine the allegation with the same enthusiasm, or does your appreciation for accountability abruptly become an interest in the account holder?

Rubin told organisations not to bury their heads in the sand. Horsfield Menzies discovered a more sophisticated option: examine every grain around the critic until nobody can remember which fucking beach started the problem.

The Internet Did Not Create The Dispute

That last point matters because the enormous attention given to online commentary risks reversing cause and effect. The Cepac dispute existed before the posts. The Page recruitment call came first. The mental-health disclosure came first. The vanished interview came first. Cepac’s disputed recruitment explanation and ET3 came first. The procedural conflicts and complaint to Horsfield Menzies came before much of the later commentary.

X did not conduct the screening call. TCAP did not ask about my employment gap. A blog article did not hear my mental-health disclosure, decide whether an interview would proceed or draft Cepac’s pleaded defence. Social media documented and attacked an existing dispute; it did not conjure that dispute from the algorithmic ether.

Rubin understood that distinction perfectly in the Clarks example. Nobody imagined the online backlash had somehow caused the shoe names. The backlash exposed them. Social media was relevant because it showed how people outside the company interpreted something the company itself had produced.

Yet in the Cepac litigation, the commentary ultimately acquired enormous independent importance. Attention shifted from what happened? towards look at what he said about what happened. The latter question may have been useful to the strike-out case, but it is not a substitute for the former.

A criticism can be rude, hostile, persistent and still point at something worth investigating.

Rubin’s article used to understand that.

Mauled Across Social Media

The most entertaining thing about Daniel Rubin’s old article is that the underlying advice remains good. Businesses should identify unconscious bias, and preferably for reasons other than discovering where the leverage points are. They should ensure equality of opportunity, interrogate their own processes and resist the comforting instinct to assume the problem must exist somewhere outside the building.

They also should not bury their heads in the sand when public criticism arrives. Sometimes the internet really has noticed something the organisation did not want to see.

Horsfield Menzies had an unusually generous opportunity to apply that philosophy. The private complaint arrived first. Daniel Rubin himself received it. If the allegations were wrong, the firm could investigate and explain why. If anything had gone wrong, it could fix it before public criticism became a permanent part of the story.

Instead, the issues survived, the criticism became public and Horsfield Menzies subsequently helped turn nearly two hundred pages of that criticism into deliberately late-served material for the proceedings against the critic.

Daniel Rubin had warned organisations exactly what could happen when discrimination and bias were not dealt with convincingly.

They could be mauled across social media.

He was right.

The slightly awkward part came when the teeth pointed towards his side of the table.

Horsfield Menzies did not merely read the fucking mauling. In one of a series of late ambushes, it printed nearly 200 pages of it out and handed them to the judge.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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