I would not be surprised if the claimants in the phone hacking claim against the publishers of The Daily Mail are really hacked off and may not be too keen on their legal team. Unity does not practice in the field of privacy and defamation but it has seemed to me as a commercial lawyer looking on that they had a mountain to climb once their only witness who said that he knew of the phone hacking in their cases reneged on his statement. They had somehow to persuade a court that it could be inferred that the only way that The Mail could have got the stories was by hacking their phones when the publishers had produced credible evidence from the journalists as to how they got the stories. Now they are facing somewhere up to £50 million in paying the Mail’s costs. My guess is that their own solicitors and barristers had the benefit of litigation funding and that they had After The Event Insurance to cover an order for costs against them but it may not cover the totality of those costs.
I wonder what chances of success the legal team gave the claimants and whether the claimants or some of them ignored that advice. The judgment can be found at Lawrence & Others v Associated [2026] EWHC 1637 (KB) at www.judiciary.uk. Judgments