Horsfield Menzies – Blog vs Behaviour : SAM BUTLER – CUT THE CAUSE, KEEP THE REACTION

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Sam Butler’s “REMOTE CONTROL?” article tells employers to examine context before condemning conduct. Sensible advice. Now put it beside the Cepac file, where my attempts to get the Tribunal to address the respondents’ conduct became part of the case against mine. The request for intervention survived. What I wanted the Tribunal to intervene over became background noise.

That is the editorial trick at the centre of this story. Start the recording at the angry response. Keep the swear word, trim the unanswered application and turn down the volume when somebody asks what the solicitors were doing. By the final screening, the claimant appears to have materialised inside the proceedings already shouting.

I kept asking the Tribunal to control the process and deal with the respondent conduct I was challenging. Those requests did not secure the intervention I sought. Meanwhile, the correspondence they generated helped furnish the argument that I was the problem. By the time Employment Judge T.R. Smith’s March 2026 letter arrived, I believed the outcome was already being prepared.

Butler’s blog recommends examining the circumstances. The conduct case made my reactions the main attraction. Let us put the missing fucking footage back in.

Sam Butler’s Remote Control Lesson

On 30 May 2025, Horsfield Menzies published Butler’s account of Wicken v Akita Systems Limited. His article described a request to attend a meeting through Microsoft Teams, management’s insistence on physical attendance and the importance of handling workplace disputes fairly.

Butler’s recommendations included examining remote requests in context, engaging properly with grievances and avoiding prejudged outcomes. The practical point was straightforward: an organisation should investigate what happened before deciding what somebody’s behaviour means. Annoyance from the person in charge does not complete that exercise.

The underlying judgment makes the comparison sharper. Wicken challenged his grievance investigator’s independence. That investigator had known the managing director for 32 years. On 26 June 2022, he sent Wicken 62 pages of allegations about his conduct, performance and relationships. Two days later, he closed Wicken’s grievance.

Wicken resigned and won his constructive unfair-dismissal claim. The Tribunal rejected a contributory-fault reduction after examining the alleged conduct in context, although a separate 50% reduction reflected the chance of a fair dismissal anyway. In that case, the circumstances behind the employee’s response mattered.

Horsfield Menzies chose to publish that lesson. Therefore, its own treatment of complaints and procedural objections is a perfectly reasonable place to test it. The firm installed the measuring stick. TCAP has merely brought it round to the service entrance.

Before The Reactions Came The Requests

The recruitment dispute began with an interview offer and disclosure of my mental-health history. A WhatsApp message sent on the day recorded the interview offer before any Tribunal claim existed. Those were matters requiring evidence and answers. Instead, the proceedings became increasingly occupied with my correspondence, complaints and attempts to get the process under control.

My objections had identifiable subjects. They concerned the scope of respondent material, compliance with directions, uncertainty about what the Tribunal actually held and the arrangements needed for me to participate. I also challenged the solicitors’ handling of medical matters. These were requests for judicial intervention in an existing dispute, with reasons attached.

By March 2026, my rebuttal to the Tribunal identified an unsolicited respondent binder of around 150 pages and a bundle exceeding 600 pages. I challenged that expansion against the earlier restriction to relevant January events. The same rebuttal recorded delayed or missing answers to my procedural enquiries, alongside an instance of a same-day response to Butler.

That history matters when somebody later waves the size of the file around. An objection to an oversized bundle adds correspondence. Chasing an unanswered question adds correspondence too. Treating the resulting page count as a personality test allows the original problem to escape through a side door while the person reporting it gets searched.

What a magnificent bastard of an accounting system. Every request for the rules to be enforced becomes another entry on the complainant’s bill.

The Partners Closed The Complaint

On 23 March 2025, I complained to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin about Sam Butler. The concerns included medical information, contact with my medical provider, disputed statements, costs pressure and the hearing bundle. The following day, I asked for acknowledgement, confirmation of any investigation and a response timetable.

Rubin replied on 25 March:

“We will not be engaging in any further correspondence with you about this matter insofar as it relates to allegations against this firm or our staff.”

He also reserved the right to use my recent correspondence as further evidence of unreasonable conduct. Consequently, my complaint could be shut down as a subject for correspondence while remaining useful as material against me. The allegations travelled upstairs; the answer came back carrying a warning about the complainant.

Rubin wrote that reply. Horsfield and Menzies received the complaint and follow-up. Butler was the subject of the complaint and later wrote the public advice. Those roles are clear enough without attributing one man’s correspondence to another.

Meanwhile, no substantive investigation outcome answering my complaint was communicated to me. The firm had plenty to say about my conduct. Its appetite for explaining its own response was considerably less impressive. Apparently, procedural integrity could manage a blog post but struggled with the return journey to the complaints inbox.

T.R. Smith Had Already Shown Me The Weather

On 10 March 2026, the Tribunal sent correspondence following Employment Judge T.R. Smith’s review. It described three hours spent on a file of 1,941 pages, called the proceedings a “simple claim” and supplied its allocation of blame:

“The principle culprit is the claimant.”

That is the spelling in the letter. More consequential was the conclusion. Before the April hearing, a duty-judge communication had already selected the person chiefly responsible for the procedural mess. The letter also criticised my language, attendance and applications.

My response challenged both the account of the claim and the allocation of responsibility. It identified respondent material that had swollen the file and explained why applications had been necessary. I was asking the Tribunal to confront how the proceedings had reached that state, including its own handling of my attempts to obtain clarity.

By then, I regarded the process as predetermined. Smith’s letter had shown me which way the wind was blowing: towards another examination of my behaviour, with the respondents’ contribution pushed behind it. That was my assessment before the final hearing, recorded in objections made at the time.

Three hours, 1,941 pages and a culprit supplied. The file did not yet have an agreed list of issues, according to the same letter. Nevertheless, it already had a leading man for the blame scene. What a remarkably efficient casting department.

I Asked For Controls On The Respondent

The final judgment records what I asked for immediately before the hearing. On 21 April, I sought an adjournment, controls on late or widened respondent material and confirmation of what was actually on the Tribunal file. I also asked for the visible portal record to reflect the relevant material from both sides.

Those were concrete requests. Establish the record. Control what could be introduced. Give me an intelligible process in which to participate. A Tribunal possesses powers to manage those matters; asking it to use them was central to my attempt to get the case heard fairly.

On 22 April, I sought directions about the first respondent’s serious allegations against me. My request was that the allegations be properly particularised and supported by evidence capable of challenge, or carry no weight. The response sent on 23 April left the issues for the hearing.

That was precisely the difficulty I had identified. I was asking for the conditions of fair participation to be settled beforehand. Being told to raise them at the hearing left me trying to enter the very process whose unresolved conditions I was challenging.

This was the institutional equivalent of telling somebody to attend the fire-safety briefing inside the burning building. Then, when he objects to the arrangement, recording his reluctance as a disappointing attitude towards training.

Disability Was Part Of The Context

My requests for remote participation belonged to that same history. Anxiety, depression and difficulty managing emotions under stress appeared in the medical material. Emotional dysregulation under pressure formed part of the disability context I was asking the Tribunal to understand.

Horsfield Menzies did not oppose every request for CVP. One conversion proceeded without its objection. However, the respondent’s later costs argument included “unfounded applications for postponement, CVP hearings and recusal”, relying on repetition and alleged evidential shortcomings.

The important question concerns how those requests arose and why they continued. My position was that unresolved procedural problems were obstructing safe participation. An account that concentrates on the number of applications and the work they generated can leave the underlying barriers almost invisible.

Butler’s article tells readers to examine context. Here, I was repeatedly trying to get that context addressed before another hearing. Instead, the applications themselves became part of the material advanced against me. The more I tried to secure intervention, the more correspondence there was to present as evidence that intervention was needed against me.

That is a vicious little arrangement. The same system receives the warning, declines the remedy sought and later inspects the distress with the air of a man discovering an unexplained stain on his carpet.

Sixty-Two Pages And A Familiar Change Of Subject

On 23 February 2026, Rubin served two collections of strike-out evidence: 84 pages in one and 69 in the other. Those February versions totalled 153 pages and were subsequently expanded. My communications, blog material and X activity had become a substantial body of evidence for ending the claim.

Inside the first collection, entry 46 identified its source as “SRA Complaint”. Extracts appeared beside five classifications:

“Scandalous / Vexatious / Unreasonable / Disruptive / Abusive”

Those were Horsfield Menzies’ classifications. A complaint seeking scrutiny of the firm had been repackaged as an exhibit in its criticism of the complainant. The paperwork could travel towards a strike-out application with considerably greater enthusiasm than an answer travelled back to me.

The resemblance to the case Butler selected lies in that change of subject. Wicken’s grievance met allegations about Wicken. My complaints and procedural objections became material about Thompson. Once the person raising the concern occupies centre stage, the concern itself can spend the rest of the performance waiting in the fucking wings.

Readers can examine the documents and assess the comparison. What they should not receive is a version of events that starts with my reaction and politely forgets the requests, refusals and unresolved disputes that preceded it. That edit does the respondents’ work for them.

The Order Does Not Rewrite The History

Following the hearing on 24 April 2026, the Tribunal struck out my claims and ordered £20,000 in costs. It found my conduct unreasonable, scandalous and vexatious, and said my comments about the respondents’ solicitors lacked a reasonable foundation.

The judgments state that my evidence and allegations about respondent conduct were considered. I do not accept that they received a fair examination. Smith’s earlier letter, the handling of my applications and the refusal to resolve the participation problems before the hearing are central to that assessment.

A judgment stating that material was considered does not answer my criticism of how it was treated. Nor does it require me to adopt the Tribunal’s account of the process as my own. I had challenged that account before the hearing, while there was still an opportunity to change the course of events.

The underlying recruitment dispute ended without a completed merits hearing. Meanwhile, my attempts to get the Tribunal to address the respondents’ conduct had helped supply a sprawling case about mine. That is the outcome I am criticising, and the sequence belongs beside it.

I will not retell that history as a sheepish little morality play about learning to be less troublesome. The trouble I was reporting deserves examination. Reducing the story to my tone is the same shitty edit with a more respectable narrator.

Put The Context Back, Sam

Sam Butler’s Remote Control article offers an entirely usable standard: examine the circumstances, handle complaints properly and approach decisions with an open mind. Horsfield Menzies can explain how its own handling of this complaint and these procedural requests met that standard.

Start with the complaint sent to the partners. Then address the matters behind my applications, the response to requests for controls on respondent material and the use of those applications in the conduct case. An answer should follow the chronology far enough back to include what I was asking somebody to stop.

TCAP will publish a substantive response and correct anything the evidence requires. That invitation has room for documents, dates and reasoned answers. Another inventory of adjectives will add bugger all.

Restore the context. Account for the conduct I was asking the Tribunal to address. Then explain why your public advice takes such an interest in the causes of somebody else’s dispute and your case against me took such an interest in the reactions.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

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