Planned costs of Harry and Mail publisher legal battle ‘excessive’, judges rule
The Duke of Sussex and other high-profile individuals are suing Associated Newspapers Limited over claims of misuse of private information.
Several high-profile individuals including the Duke of Sussex should spend over £14 million less than they proposed for their legal battle with the publisher of the Daily Mail, two High Court judges have ruled.
Harry is among a group of people – including Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish, actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley, and politician Sir Simon Hughes – who are bringing legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over alleged misuse of private information.
ANL firmly denies the allegations and is defending the legal action.
In a ruling on Friday following a preliminary hearing in November last year, Mr Justice Nicklin and Judge David Cook said the two sides had proposed to spend more than £38.8 million in the legal claim combined, with the claimants proposing to spend around £18.7 million.
But Judge Cook said he and Mr Justice Nicklin “had little difficulty concluding that such sums were manifestly excessive and therefore disproportionate”.
The pair ruled that the claimants could spend around £4.1 million, and ANL around £4.5 million, in the case.
The trial of the claims could be heard in 2026, with Judge Cook stating that the “anticipated length of the trial will be 45 days”.
The claimants have accused ANL of allegedly carrying out or commissioning unlawful activities, such as hiring private investigators to place listening devices inside cars, “blagging” private records, burglaries to order and accessing and recording private phone conversations.
The publisher has previously told the court that the claims are “lurid” and “simply preposterous”.
During the hearing last November, Mr Justice Nicklin said his “objective” was to progress the claim to trial, which he said could start on January 14 2026.
In a 10-page ruling, Judge Cook said the legal claims were “really rather simple”.
He said: “In respect of each of the articles upon which the claimants rely, they say they were the product of unlawful information gathering. This is not a subtle question.
“The claimants will either succeed or fail in demonstrating the proposition. If the relevant claimant fails, that will be the end of the claim in respect of that article.
“If the claimant succeeds, the question of remedy will arise and on this issue the law is clear.”
Judge Cook continued: “This is not to downplay the complexity of the factual issues that may arise in the litigation, but it puts these claims in the context of the sorts of litigation that come before the courts.
“The fact that these claimants are well-known, and the litigation high-profile, does not affect the issues that must be resolved.”
He said: “Costs management is not an exercise of reducing the parties’ costs to an irreducible minimum but setting reasonable and proportionate parameters.”
The ruling comes days after Harry settled his claim against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the publisher of The Sun and now-defunct News Of The World, shortly before the start of a trial of his legal claim against the company.
The duke and Lord Tom Watson, the former deputy Labour leader, had taken legal action against the publisher over allegations of unlawful information gathering.
On Wednesday, the two sides agreed to settle the claims, with Harry receiving a “full and unequivocal” apology from NGN for “serious intrusion” into his private life by The Sun between 1996 and 2011 which included “incidents of unlawful activities”, as well as being offered “substantial damages”.
