Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Alex Hall and Charlotte Harris, partner, Mishcon de Reya solicitors, and solicitor to Alex
Hall—Oral evidence (QQ 1629–1731)
Q1688 Lord Thomas of Gresford: Can I ask if there is after-the-event insurance
involved and, if so, what the premium was?
Charlotte Harris: There wasn’t ATE insurance on this. It would have been
extremely difficult to insure.
Q1689 Lord Thomas of Gresford: I would have thought it would be a very
difficult risk for insurers to take on.
Charlotte Harris: Yes, and there wasn’t insurance. It is always nice if you can get it,
but I do not think they would have gone for it and, at the end of the day, it might have been
more difficult to settle. One of the problems with ATE insurance is that when there is a big
premium that the other side have to pay if they lose, then it is another big cost.
Q1690 Lord Thomas of Gresford: Can you give us some idea of the size of ATE
insurance in a privacy case?
Charlotte Harris: I can only go by the ones that I have done, and most of my
litigation experience of ATE has been with the phone hacking cases, which are probably not
the best examples. I do have another case that has ATE insurance at the moment. I do not
want to give you the wrong evidence by accident; I think that these are six-figure sums
sometimes.
Q1691 Lord Thomas of Gresford: Six-figure sums?
Charlotte Harris: Yes. It would not be unusual.
Q1692 Lord Thomas of Gresford: That is the insurance premium?
Charlotte Harris: Yes, the insurance that the other side would have to pay if they
lost. Sometimes you have insurance that you pay up front as a premium yourself, and then
there is contingency and non-contingency based. Sometimes—maybe if you are getting
insurance late—you might find that your client or the claimant pays a smaller sum. That
might be, in a privacy case, something between—I don’t know—£15,000 to £25,000,
depending on what stage the proceedings are at. I am trying not to pull numbers out of hats,
but as to what happens later, they are big, and that can cause a problem as well; it is not
necessarily an incentive to settle.
Q1693 Martin Horwood: May I say for the record that if all writers promised not
to write about anything personal, the art of biography would be either dead in the water, or
very dull? Alex, at the time you received the injunction, were you already in discussions with
a publisher about this prospective book?
Alex Hall: No, I was looking for a publisher.
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