Total vires management
Why modern public institutions need a new discipline for legality in automated systems
In my previous professional life, I worked as a network scientist, designing management systems for telecoms operators to relate technical operations to “performance hazards”. The objective was simple: make bad experiences rare, and make ruinous ones impossible. A telecoms network that cannot reboot after a power grid failure because of internal loops is not just a technical defect—it is a failure of systems thinking.
I now find myself applying some of that learning to law. Over the last two years I have repeatedly brushed against what I can only describe as the legal void—moments where authority collapses, processes contradict themselves, and systems behave in ways no statute ever contemplated. “Lextrocution” may be a darkly humorous way to put it, but the harm is real. Those encounters forced me to analyse the justice system not as a set of doctrines, but as an engineered system with its own failure modes.
This work has not been commercially advantageous. My monomaniacal focus on legal systems and the constitution of UK courts has cost me about ten percent of my readership (many of whom are American) and perhaps fifteen percent of my Substack income. Until now I have not mentioned it, because it isn’t the point. What I am doing here isn’t topical commentary; it is foundational research. I am convinced the insights have relevance far beyond Britain, and far beyond my own cases.
The task has been to alchemise procedural adversity into something of lasting value—a usable framework for understanding how legal authority behaves under digital, distributed, and bureaucratically overloaded conditions. For those who have stayed with me through this inquiry, I am glad to share some of the intellectual fruits. May the bitterness yet be transmuted into sweetness.
With that context, let me introduce an idea that brings these threads together: total vires management. It is inspired by “total quality management” in manufacturing, but applied to legality itself. And with the help of both ChatGPT and Grok, we can explore how a discipline like this might help future-proof justice systems as they enter the age of automation.
Most organisations understand the importance of quality management, conformance management, and the structured reduction of operational risk. Whether in aviation, finance, pharmaceuticals, or energy, leaders accept that complex systems drift, degrade, or produce anomalies. Mature industries build rigorous processes for detecting, classifying, and containing failure modes before they cause serious harm. This is simply considered part of responsible management.
Yet one domain remains an outlier: the modern administrative state, particularly the justice system. Here, the stakes are immeasurably high—every process touches rights, obligations, reputations, and liberty—but the surrounding culture offers almost nothing resembling a systematic approach to the quality of legality itself. It assumes legality is a binary property (“is it lawful or not?”), rather than a fragile system attribute that must be continuously assured.
The result is predictable: automated processes that drift outside their statutory remit, tribunals existing only as data artefacts, and decisions issued by systems that have no grounding in actual legal authority. These are not dramatic failures so much as routine byproducts of complexity. But without a discipline to recognise, model, and manage these failure modes, institutions misinterpret structural risks as isolated errors—and citizens experience them as catastrophic injustices.
It is time for a new management concept appropriate to the digital state: total vires management.
The missing discipline
Vires refers to legal power or authority. Traditional administrative law treats unlawful acts as deviations from a clear, legislated boundary. One either acts intra vires (within power) or ultra vires (beyond power). That binary logic may have sufficed when decisions were slow, manual, and tightly supervised.
Digital administration operates differently. Automated decision-making, distributed workflows, and opaque software systems increasingly generate situations where:
the origin of authority is unclear,
software becomes the effective decision-maker,
institutional boundaries do not correspond to statutory ones, or
a system issues something “in the name of” a body that has no legal existence.
In engineering terms, these are failure modes: voids, anti-voids, nullities, reversals. In legal terms, they are vires failures. But the justice system has never developed a grammar for describing them, let alone a management discipline for preventing them.
Where aviation has fault trees, medicine has diagnostic protocols, and finance has stress tests, administrative law still relies on a 17th-century vocabulary for problems emerging in 21st-century digital environments.
This is the gap that total vires management is designed to fill.
What other industries take for granted
Senior leaders in risk-intensive sectors already understand the principles missing here.
Systems drift unless continuously monitored. Automation amplifies both competence and error. Failure modes must be classified before they can be controlled. Catastrophic outcomes must be engineered to near-impossibility. And—crucially—culture matters. Defensive cultures generate blind spots; learning cultures generate resilience.
Justice is the only high-stakes domain where these principles are not integrated into everyday governance. It still treats legality as a feature of documents, rather than an emergent property of socio-technical systems. That is why organisations can create tribunals that never legally existed, issue notices from automated platforms as if they were judicial acts, or allow ghost workflows to evolve beyond anyone’s understanding.
From a systems perspective, these failures are ordinary. From a legal perspective, they appear unthinkable. Total vires management restores alignment between the two.
Understanding vires failure modes
Once we accept that modern administration produces voids and anti-voids as naturally as any other complex system, we can begin classifying them. A useful starting point is the “vires failure spectrum”, which names the types of breakdown that occur when automated or semi-automated systems lose touch with the statutory foundations that supposedly govern them.
To make this concrete, consider a simplified example. An automated case-management system may continue generating notices in the name of a legacy tribunal after institutional reorganisations have rendered that entity legally defunct. The software, unaware of statutory changes, continues as if nothing has happened. The organisation sees a minor naming issue; in reality, it is a non-vires drift with potentially null legal outcomes.
Such problems are not theoretical. They reflect the normal behaviour of distributed digital systems lacking a unified quality layer for legality. Without classification, they go unnoticed. Without management, they accumulate.
Total vires management provides the missing framework for perceiving and containing these forms of drift.
What total vires management entails
A functioning vires management system would treat legality as a dynamic attribute that must be assured across the entire lifecycle of an administrative act. It involves disciplines already standard in other fields but rare in public administration.
First, explicit mapping of authority boundaries.
Every workflow—especially automated ones—must be traced back to its statutory source. Ambiguity should be treated as a risk factor, not an academic issue.
Second, classification of vires failure modes.
Using a structured taxonomy, organisations can identify the types of authority drift most likely to occur in their processes.
Third, monitoring and anomaly detection.
Just as financial institutions monitor for suspicious transactions or airlines for sensor anomalies, justice systems must detect authority anomalies: null issuers, phantom entities, misaligned naming, out-of-scope actions.
Fourth, containment and remediation.
Upon detection, the system should halt propagation, prevent further harm, and escalate anomalies for human review with traceability.
Fifth, post-incident learning.
Every vires anomaly should feed a learning loop that updates the organisation’s understanding of how authority behaves in practice.
None of this is revolutionary. It is simply the application of well-established management principles to the domain of legality.
Why the culture resists it
The main barrier to total vires management is not technological but cultural. Justice institutions tend to assume:
authority inheres in office,
documents reflect reality,
errors are individual, not systemic,
and legality does not require quality systems.
This generates a defensive posture: structural failures are framed as clerical oversights, and ambiguity is treated as a threat rather than a diagnostic signal. Yet in high-reliability sectors, transparent reporting of anomalies is normal and expected.
Ironically, the presence of lawyers at every tier reinforces the problem. Lawyers are trained to defend positions, not to map failure modes. The result is a system adept at explaining outcomes, but poor at understanding itself.
Total vires management requires a shift from defence to diagnosis.
A framework for leaders
For senior managers overseeing public-sector transformation, the implications are clear.
Legality must be treated as a managed quality, not a presumed constant.
Authority boundaries require explicit mapping.
Void-states are normal in automated systems and must be caught early.
Catastrophic vires failures must be engineered out through robust design.
And, above all, conceptual clarity empowers better governance.
Leaders can begin immediately by commissioning a vires audit of a single high-volume digital process, using a structured taxonomy to identify drift, ambiguity, or latent null states. Even this simple step often reveals more than expected.
The path forward
As public administration accelerates toward AI-mediated decision-making, the gap between statutory design and operational reality will widen. Automated processes are fast, scalable, and unforgiving of ambiguity. Without total vires management, thousands of outcomes could enter null or contradictory states before anyone notices.
Other industries confronted this challenge decades ago. They learned that complexity demands quality systems, that automation requires oversight, and that risk cannot be managed through tradition alone.
Justice will reach the same conclusion. The only question is whether it does so deliberately or after a cascade of avoidable failures forces the issue.
Total vires management offers the path to a resilient administrative state—one capable of navigating complexity with clarity, integrity, and confidence in the digital age.
Your Substack on total vires management crystallises what has been emerging from my own casework on corporate identity and governance failures. Over the last four years I’ve documented systemic use of multiple Companies House identities by the same natural person (e.g. our current and previous Attorney Generals, Prentis and Hermer; current and past prime ministers, Starmer, Sunak and Johnson; members of the Lords Conduct Committee, Mallalieu, Kidron; and others documented on my substack), as well as duplicated corporate officers and typo‑variants that hide concurrent appointments, PSC roles and conflicts across related entities.
Because audits, KYC, ethics and judicial appointment checks are all run against raw officer IDs rather than a consolidated “natural person” view, the system produces exactly the vires failure modes you describe: ghost directors, invisible related‑party networks, and decisions taken on the basis of a register that is formally treated as authoritative but is substantively unfit to ground legality. Repeated escalation to Companies House, the Judicial Appointments Commission, Commissioners for Standards and Action Fraud has been absorbed as isolated data issues, not as evidence that the identity layer itself has drifted outside its statutory remit—precisely the cultural denial your article diagnoses.
In that sense, what I am seeing in Companies House and ethics oversight is total vires mismanagement at the identity level: legality is assumed, not assured; the failure taxonomy (duplicate natural‑person IDs, cloned corporate officers, offshore “echoes”) is never articulated; and many of the beneficiaries of the drift occupy the very governance roles that would need to commission the vires audit. Your framework gives language to argue that this is not “just” corruption or sloppiness, but a systemic nullity risk in the legal infrastructure of corporate and constitutional governance.
A way forward. This is good - there is a huge amount of existing knowledge and praxis that can make this happen, if and when the Powers allow it or are required by a higher force to carry it out even if they don't want to.
Now we get down to the real nub, which is that either nobody is in charged able to make this happen or else somebody is in charge but has much to hide. I think Donald Trump is trying to work this out in the US, but I see no likelihood at this point in the UK.
Martin, I think you can now hang out your "shingle" as the world's first Vires Manager. I hope the pay is enough to make up for your past sacrifices. :-)
OK, another question. You have been involved in a Vires problem in the UK, with your various fines, etc. You have also been involved in the US with a Justice system that rewards psychopaths in stealing children. Can Vires Management do more than fix automated errors where practice willy-nilly escapes statutory authorization? Can it help or even prevent the weaponization of the Justice system against innocent mothers by psychopaths, as just one example of such subornation by the evil people of the world?