Unlawful information gathering: Baroness Lawrence v Associated Newspapers [2026]

The claimants each alleged that Associated had unlawfully gathered their private and/or confidential information through covert methods, including phone hacking, phone tapping, “blagging”, the use of private investigators and corrupt payments, before publishing that information in newspaper articles.

The judgment was a highly anticipated decision, following an approximately 11-week trial between 19 January and 31 March 2026. Nicklin J rejected all the claimants’ pleaded allegations of unlawful information gathering (“UIG”).

Background

The seven claimants brought six separate claims, with Sir Elton John and David Furnish claiming jointly. In total, 57 separate articles/incidents published between 1997 and 2015 were considered.

Alongside article-specific allegations, the claimants advanced a broad case that Associated had habitually and widely used unlawful information gathering and concealed its use, relying on similar fact evidence including evidence arising from UIG litigation involving other newspaper groups.

Associated denied all wrongdoing. It argued that the Claimants had failed to establish the alleged unlawful acts and, in the alternative, the claims were based on historic events and were time-barred.

The scale of the litigation was enormous. The path to trial involved substantial interim case management, including several case management conferences, cost budgets collectively over £38.8m, witness anonymity applications, and a failed summary judgment/strike out application.

Judgment

It is no surprise that the judgment runs to 1,606 paragraphs in total. It considered oral evidence from 52 witnesses at trial, together with extensive documentary material.

What are the claims?

MPI protects information in which an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, subject to balancing that with the competing right to freedom of expression. A breach of confidence claim requires the claimant to establish, amongst other things, that information was imparted or acquired in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence.

Unlawful information gathering refers to the unlawful methods by which the relevant information is obtained, and can provide the evidential link between the defendant’s conduct in obtaining the information and the claimant’s rights in respect of that information.

Consequently, the central issue in this litigation was a fundamental question: had the claimants proved that the relevant private or confidential information had been obtained unlawfully?

Evidential burden

The burden of proof rested with the claimants on the balance of probabilities.

The Court recognised that the allegations were serious, so evidence of UIG needed to be compelling rather than “mere suspicion”. Crucially, the Court rejected the proposition that the privacy of the information, or the absence of an obvious lawful source, could establish UIG by way of broad inference.

It therefore applied an article-by-article approach to consider each of the 57 pleaded articles and incidents against the available evidence for each of those articles or incidents. The generic case could provide context, but couldn’t substitute for proof of a specific allegation.

That distinction was particularly important where the claimants sought to rely on propensity evidence (i.e. evidence of similar conduct on other occasions). Even if a particular journalist had engaged in unlawful information gathering in the past, that did not establish that the journalist had done so in relation to this case.

The Court adopted a cautious approach to historical evidence and recognised the inherent fallibility of memory over the decades since the events in question. Contemporaneous documents were treated as more reliable than recollection, but the documentary record was itself incomplete. Missing documents could affect the inferences made by the Court, but could not fill an evidential gap when there was no positive evidence of UIG. The Court also accepted that information which appears difficult to explain may nevertheless have been obtained lawfully, and an inability to explain how information was sourced did not enable an inference of UIG.

Limitation period

Because liability was not established, the Court did not need to determine Associated’s limitation defence, although did resolve limitation as an alternative finding in relation to the claims by Sir Simon Hughes and Sadie Frost Law. The Court held that those claims would, in any event, have been time-barred.

Consequential decision

The litigation returned to court on 29 and 30 July 2026, with judgment on consequential matters handed down on 21 August 2026.

The Claimants accepted that they were liable for Associated’s costs. The two principal issues to be resolved were (i) whether the Claimants should pay costs on the standard or indemnity basis; and (ii) the sum to be paid by the Claimants on account of costs.

Nicklin J ordered indemnity costs, save where costs orders had already been made. The Court considered that, cumulatively, the way the litigation was brought and conducted was outside the norm. Factors taken into account included the litigation being conceived and pleaded on “an unjustifiably wide canvas”, the seriousness of the allegation that were maintained, the reliance on unsupported evidence, the failure to narrow, withdraw or abandon allegations as the evidential picture developed, and the introduction of unpleaded allegations at trial.

Importantly, the Court did not find that the claimants had been dishonest, or that every step taken was unreasonable or hopeless. It was the cumulative conduct of the litigation that had been found to be unreasonable to a high degree.

Associated stated that it has incurred costs exceeding £34m. Although the Court described that figure as exceptionally high (and unprecedented in the Media and Communications List) and expressed real concerns as to whether all of the costs had been reasonably incurred, it declined to impose a cap.

The Claimants were ordered to make an interim payment of around £9.5m on account by 28 August 2026, with the final recoverable sum to be determined through detailed assessment.

Comment

Although this is one of the longest and most high-profile privacy judgments of recent times, it is highly fact specific and does not offer especially novel points of law. That said, its central lessons and reminders are of wider application.

1. Serious allegations require serious evidence. Suspicion or inference, however understandable, cannot substitute for proof of a particular unlawful alleged act.
2. Pleading and evidence discipline can be decisive. A claimant cannot use the trial process (including cross-examination and closing submissions) to escalate or reformulate unpleaded mechanisms of UIG or other wrongdoing.
3. Propensity evidence has limits. Evidence that an individual has used unlawful methods in the past to obtain information does not, without further evidence, establish that they did so in any particular instance. Claimants must still demonstrate a sufficiently close evidential link between the alleged unlawful conduct and published information in issue.
4. Contemporaneous evidence is critical. In historic claims, memories will inevitably be vulnerable to the passage of time. Documents, correspondence, notes, telephone records or other contemporaneous material may become decisive, and their absence may make it considerably more difficult for a claimant to displace a credible lawful explanation advanced by the defendant.
5. Litigation is a process of continual reassessment. Allegations that can no longer properly be maintained as evidence develops should be narrowed or withdrawn rather than left to fall away at trial, as the costs judgment in this case underscores.

For more information on UIG, privacy litigation or the issues covered in this update, please contact the TMT team at DMH Stallard.