British Lawyer Mark Lewis Filed One of the First Suits Against News Corp.
In 2008, attorney Mark Lewis struck a lucrative settlement with News Corp. in one of the first lawsuits over phone hacking at the company's News of the World tabloid. He then left his Manchester law firm after the other partners demanded he stop pursuing such cases.
Three years later, Mr. Lewis is at the center of civil litigation against News Corp. He says he has a roster of more than 70 clients who believe News of the World illegally intercepted their cellphone voice mails. This week, he appears close to clinching his biggest coup yet—a roughly $4.7 million payment related to allegations that the tabloid hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002.
The payment, expected to be announced within days, will include £2 million, or about $3 million, from a News Corp. unit to Milly Dowler's parents and sister, according to people familiar with the matter. It will also include £1 million from News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch personally, which will go to charities selected by the Dowler family, the people said.
Mr. Lewis, who once counted himself an avid reader of News of the World, has become one of News Corp.'s chief antagonists in the phone-hacking drama. He also represents an Irish jockey, a publicist for celebrities and a former assistant to model Elle Macpherson, among others. So far, Mr. Lewis has filed seven cases against News of the World and says he's preparing some against other papers.
It's an unlikely role for a self-described lazy student with poor grades who grew up in a rough neighborhood in north Manchester, England. He says he blustered his way into a college in north London, and then went to law school at University of Chester in the U.K. In his mid-20s, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which eventually left him with a limp and a weakened arm but which "didn't really stop me as a lawyer," he says during a recent interview.
There is little love lost between Mr. Lewis and News Corp. Mr. Lewis says he has seen a dossier of information that News International, the company's U.K. newspaper unit, compiled about him, including details about his health, education and career. "I have no idea why they were collecting it. It looked like information you might get for a story," he says. He says he passed the dossier to the police.
In response to questions this month from a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking, Tom Crone, a former News of the World lawyer, said News International had hired a freelance journalist to gather information on two lawyers involved in the phone-hacking lawsuits. He didn't name the lawyers. Mr. Crone couldn't be reached Tuesday.
A News International spokeswoman says no current executives of the company commissioned a dossier. The company declines to comment on Mr. Lewis generally. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.
When allegations of phone-hacking first surfaced in 2006, Mr. Lewis worked for George Davies Solicitors LLP in Manchester and was among the few lawyers there specializing in defamation cases. One client was a soccer players' union. The head of the union, Gordon Taylor, learned in 2005 that the News of the World planned to run a story alleging that he was having an affair with a female colleague. Mr. Lewis says the allegation was untrue, and that he persuaded the paper not to run the article. News International declines to comment.
A year later, a News of the World reporter and a private investigator working for the paper pleaded guilty to criminal charges of hacking the phones of royal-family aides, and it emerged in court that other phones, including Mr. Taylor's, also had been hacked.
Mr. Lewis realized the paper had probably developed its theory about the alleged affair after listening to Mr. Taylor's voice mails. "That was my eureka moment," he says. Soon after, he filed the first phone-hacking civil claim, alleging that the tabloid's owner had invaded Mr. Taylor's privacy.
Mr. Lewis was the first to recognize that phone hacking was not just a crime but "a civil wrong, as well, for which damages would be payable," says Jeremy Reed, a barrister hired by Mr. Lewis to litigate the Taylor case. Media lawyers in the U.K. typically had focused on defamation—that is, whether a newspaper harmed someone by reporting something false—rather than questioning how a paper obtained the information, Mr. Reed says.
News International paid more than £700,000, including legal fees, to settle the case with Mr. Taylor, far exceeding the damages that courts had awarded plaintiffs in previous invasion-of-privacy cases.
When the settlement became public in 2009, Mr. Lewis says other public figures contacted him wanting to sue. But his law firm ordered him not to accept more phone-hacking clients and expelled him from the partnership when he refused, Mr. Lewis says.
Mark Hovell, managing partner at George Davies, says in an email that Mr. Lewis "made it clear to the partnership that he wanted to pursue the phone hacking work; the other partners did not want to move in that direction, so we parted company with Mark."
An avid collector of classic cars, Mr. Lewis says he sold some of his collection to make ends meet in 2009 and 2010. "At that time I have no job, I'm living in a rented flat and I don't care who Rupert Murdoch is," he says.
Mr. Lewis moved to London in 2010 and began working for Taylor Hampton Solicitors, one of whose founders, Daniel Taylor, is a former in-house lawyer for News International. Mr. Lewis calls that a "complete coincidence" to his decision to work at the firm and says Mr. Taylor "won't have anything to do" with the phone-hacking cases. Mr. Taylor didn't respond to requests for comment.
In July, after Rupert Murdoch met with and apologized to Milly Dowler's parents and sister, he sent Mr. Lewis a letter thanking him for arranging the meeting. Mr. Lewis framed the letter to hang on his office wall.
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