Legal News

Berlin’s Data Protection Authority ( DPA) has imposed a €300,000 penalty on a Berlin-based bank for three breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation ( EU) 2016/679......

Rancom Security Ltd v Girling and others [2023] EWHC 1115 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of this case? This judgment has two strands—a refresher on essential legal principles and a pragmatic guide for disputes practitioners, notably those pursuing civil fraud or dishonesty claims, when building a case. Conflicting evidence Beyond its survey of principle, the court offers a detailed account of how it confronts a routine but difficult problem: conflicting evidence. It sets out the framework for evaluating changing accounts, gaps in proof, defects in disclosure, and the way witness statements and the litigation process can shape witnesses' recollections. The judgment also illustrates the courts' approach to weighing credibility and drawing adverse inferences. While the findings inevitably turn on the facts, and arose within a dishonesty context, the court's treatment of these topics has broader resonance for any disputes lawyer. The sheer range of matters the judge...

Intricate tax planning may amount to confidential information, notwithstanding parallel arrangements by others ( Kieran Corrigan & Co Ltd v One E Group) Kieran Corrigan and Co Ltd v One E Group Ltd and others [2023] EWHC 649 ( Ch) (23 March 2023) What are the practical implications of this case? The ruling is indispensable reading for practitioners handling disputed confidentiality claims. The judge explored the nuanced considerations underpinning whether particular material is confidential, while also providing a crisp, thorough synopsis of the breach of confidence jurisprudence as a whole, beginning with the test in Coco v AN Clark ( Engineers) Ltd [1969] RPC 41. The discussion spans scenarios where products are already publicly available (yet secrecy is claimed in the design), where the confidential corpus blends ‘public’ with ‘private’ elements, and where numerous ‘public’ components are assembled to yield...

The Information Commissioner’s Office ( ICO) imposed a £12.7m penalty on Tik Tok Information Technologies UK Limited and Tik Tok Inc ( Tik Tok) for violations of the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation, Retained Regulation ( EU) 2016/679 ( UK GDPR), including not handling children’s personal data lawfully. The ICO estimates in 2020 Tik Tok permitted up to 1.4m UK children under......

Soriano v Forensic News LLC and others [2023] EWCA Civ 223 What are the practical implications of this case? The English courts may grant an anti-suit injunction to restrain overseas proceedings where a party acts unreasonably. Yet they will not usually exercise that discretion where the foreign claimant is lawfully seeking documents they say they need for their claim. That holds even if the relief pursued abroad is broader than an English court would typically order. Though the dispute concerned defamation, the guidance reaches beyond that field. The Court of Appeal essentially affirmed support for legitimate evidence-gathering and is slow to conclude that recourse to foreign processes to obtain evidence is oppressive. What was the background? The appellant holds both British and Israeli nationality, has lived in the UK since 2003, and became a British citizen in 2009. He issued libel claims against a number of...

Inter Digital Technology Corp and others v One Plus Technology ( Shenzhen) Co and others [2023] EWCA Civ 166 What are the practical implications of this case? As is long recognised, standard-essential patents must be offered under clear, Fair, Reasonable and Non- Discriminatory ( FRAND) terms. In these matters, once technical trials determine, following detailed evidence, that one or more patents are truly essential and valid, a subsequent FRAND trial sets the conditions of a FRAND licence. As part of that process, and as confirmed by the Supreme Court in Unwired Planet v Huawei [2020] UKSC 37, the claimant’s existing licences are carefully examined to identify FRAND terms. Accordingly, SEP infringement actions in the courts of England and Wales commonly see defendants routinely pursuing pre-action disclosure of prior SEP licensing agreements. Given the highly confidential nature of those agreements, the court typically...

FGX v Gaunt [2023] EWHC 419 ( KB) What are the practical implications of this case? The level of damages will not astonish media law specialists, who have been resolving comparable actions in this range for many years now. A scarcity of authority exists because these disputes are typically compromised at an early juncture (a defendant being on a hiding to nothing and courting serious and severe reputational damage by letting a claimant proceed to trial) or, alternatively, potential defendants have not been chased owing to worries about recoverability. FGX is a welcome decision, likely to discourage would‑be offenders, while giving claimant solicitors a citation to leverage in settlement discussions. Even so, practitioners should remember that these claims turn on their facts. In FGX, the court applied the eggshell‑skull principle: the consequences of image‑based abuse can differ markedly between claimants. In this...

Blake and others v Fox [2022] EWHC 3542 ( KB) What are the practical implications of this case? The court stressed that, in defamation, the central question is the meaning conveyed by the words complained of; the speaker’s intention does not matter. Here, the judge drew a clear line between ‘opinion’ and ‘mere abuse’, finding that describing someone as a racist is an opinion (albeit forcefully put), whereas calling someone a paedophile is not. Whether a statement is opinion is crucial if a party seeks to invoke the defence of honestly held opinion, and it is often challenging to separate opinion from a (false) allegation. The court also underlined that truly extrinsic material cannot be relied upon to prove that a publication was, or contained, an expression of opinion. That assessment must be derived from the intrinsic material within the publication itself,...

How to witness and attest a deed under the Law of Property ( Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 ( Euro Securities & Finance v Barrett) Euro Securities & Finance Ltd v Barrett and others [2023] EWHC 51 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of this case? The safest route to prevent disputes over a deed’s validity is: all principal signatories execute at the same time and in the same location; any witness should be a non-party to the deed and observe the signatures physically, in person; and each witness should attest, separately, every signature they observed, doing so straightaway while remaining in the signatories’ presence. Each of these points ought to be documented in writing. That said, the judge in Euro Securities considered that the LP( MP) A 1989 may afford parties greater latitude. Although much of the discussion was obiter, in essence the judge...

Fearn v The Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4 What are the practical implications of this case? The Supreme Court has confirmed that visual intrusion can constitute a nuisance, though simple overlooking on its own does not. While eye-catching, the ruling is unlikely to trigger a deluge of neighbour disputes about being watched. The court contemplated that only a marked and sustained degree of visual interference would cross the threshold. As Leggatt LJ explained at [103], instances where land is put to an unusual use that causes visual intrusion of sufficient duration and intensity to found a nuisance claim are expected to be uncommon. It also remains the law that merely putting up a building or structure that looks over another parcel of land, without more, does not amount to a nuisance. Regarding grievances from occupants of highly glazed, tall...

Riley v Sivier [2022] EWHC 2891 ( KB) What are the practical implications of this case? Two notable themes arise from this careful judgment on serious harm to reputation, the public interest defence in DA 2013, s 4, and the assessment of damages. First, the court considers how evidence of poor reputation bears on serious harm. Steyn J held that ‘fresh’ allegations may still inflict serious harm even when readers already regard the claimant unfavourably. Here, the piece appeared on a site that strongly backed Jeremy Corbyn. Steyn J accepted this likely meant a sizeable share of readers were politically hostile to the claimant, who had been forthright in criticising antisemitism within the Labour Party (para [114]). Nonetheless, the new assertion that the claimant endorsed online abuse of a teenage girl would have lowered readers’ opinions of her, irrespective of...

TP ICAP Ltd v NEX Group Ltd [2022] EWHC 2700 ( Comm) The claims for breach of warranty stemmed from two probes: one by the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission concerning swaps trading linked to bond issuances and another by a Frankfurt public prosecutor targeting a named director of a group entity in relation to cum-ex trading during the relevant period. In essence, the alleged breaches concerned warranties addressing the following: that no group company, officer, or employee had been the subject of any non-routine investigation of any kind by a ‘ Governmental Authority’ within the prior 18 months; and that no circumstances existed which could reasonably be expected to result in litigation against a group company where the amount in dispute exceeds £500,000. Those warranties were, in places, qualified by a seller-awareness threshold (here defined as the actual knowledge, after...

The United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation, Retained Regulation ( EU) 2016/679, and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 ( FIA 2000) oblige public and private bodies to reply to subject access requests within one to three months when people seek details of the personal data those organisations hold about them. Yet, on 28 September 2022, the ICO announced that an investigation had found Virgin Media, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, the London Borough of Croydon, Kent Police, the London Borough of Hackney and the London Borough of Lambeth had 'repeatedly failed' to meet this statutory deadline. Following these conclusions, the regulator issued reprimands to all seven organisations and, under the FIA 2000, practice recommendations to two of the London boroughs. The agency added that these bodies have three to six months to make improvements or 'further...

Wright v Mc Cormack [2022] EWHC 2068 ( QB) (01 August 2022) What are the practical implications of this case? This is (hopefully) a one-off matter and a timely prompt for litigants to carefully check the accuracy and truthfulness of their pleadings and any witness material they intend to rely upon at trial. Although the claimant obtained damages, the judgment was notably scathing, particularly in finding that he had advanced a ‘deliberately false’ case about disinvitations from academic conferences. The claimant had sought to use those disinvitations to argue that the words complained of caused serious harm to his reputation. The court noted that, because serious harm bears on quantum, the inaccuracies surrounding the disinvitations were central to the claim. The case also stands as a stark warning that any errors within a case should be squarely addressed. The court found that the...

The EU plans to reinforce its cybersecurity regime through a second Network and Information Security Directive ( NIS2) (see: LNB News 03/12/2021 49). Alongside this, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport ( DCMS) is consulting on legislative updates intended to bolster the UK’s cyber resilience (see: LNB News 21/06/2022 41). What are the key changes proposed by the EU for NIS2? The current Network and Information Systems Directive, Directive ( EU) 2016/1148 ( NIS1), applied in the EU (including the UK) from May 2018. NIS1 focuses on boosting resilience and raising cybersecurity standards for organisations delivering essential services across sectors (for example, energy), and also oversees certain digital service providers, though to a lesser extent. Within the EU, NIS2 will supersede NIS1. The Council of the EU has released a press statement outlining the principal changes put forward by NIS2, as...

Vardy v Rooney and another [2022] EWHC 2017 ( QB) What are the practical implications of this case? This decision will attract attention as a concrete application of the truth defence, and for Steyn J’s conclusion that the public interest defence failed. It also clarifies the contours of the defences advanced in modern media litigation before the court. It further demonstrates the court’s readiness to make inferential findings of fact where: primary evidence is absent, or has been intentionally lost or destroyed journalists move to set aside witness summonses and disclosure orders by relying on source protection: see section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, and where waivers of source protection under that provision have been given ( Mrs Vardy) or given and then withdrawn ( Ms Watt) Mrs Vardy did not witness‑summon her ‘close friend and agent’, Ms Watt, who was by any measure a...

Background The UKIPO’s first call for evidence on AI and IP, running from 7 September to 30 November 2020, aimed to gather answers to numerous questions across patents, copyright, trade marks, designs and trade secrets. Feedback to that exercise highlighted concerns about the balance in the copyright regime between safeguarding human-created works and those produced by AI. Regarding patents, participants flagged potential obstacles to innovation as reliance on AI systems grows. For further details on that process, see News Analysis: Call for views on AI and IP—the UK government response. Building on those findings, the UKIPO opened an additional consultation to probe the key matters in greater depth. The resulting government response was issued on 28 June 2022 (see: LNB News 28/06/2022 48), and is considered below. Copyright and computer-generated works ( CGWs) The initial question for government was whether creations generated by a...

Unite the Union v Freitas [2022] EWHC 666 ( QB) What are the practical implications of this case? Defamation actions by trade unions are rare. In EETPU v Times Newspapers Ltd [1980] QB 585 it was determined that such actions could not be pursued, although that position likely no longer states the law: see Duncan and Neill on Defamation, 5th edn, 10.11. In granting a substantial sum (comparable with numerous general damages awards to trading companies), Mr Justice Collins Rice acknowledged the centrality of reputation to a union. The judge observed that unions depend on their standing to recruit and retain members and that, to conduct collective bargaining effectively, a reputation for acting in good faith and for recommending the best achievable outcome is fundamental to their purpose. Even so, the decision should be approached with care for two...

What are the practical implications of this case? In dismissing Bloomberg’s appeal, the Supreme Court relied extensively on a run of first‑instance decisions recognising a claimant’s reasonable expectation of privacy while they are the subject of a state investigation but have not been charged. The outcome is unsurprising, yet claimant representatives will view it as welcome confirmation that this expectation is the legitimate starting point in any given case. Although the dispute centres on the tort of misuse of private information, the court’s acceptance that, in appropriate circumstances, an individual’s reputation may fall within Article 8 will interest defamation specialists. The ruling also intensifies scrutiny of the long‑standing common law principle in Bonnard v Perryman [1891] 2 Ch 269. In essence, that principle bars a claimant from securing an interim injunction to stop publication of proposed defamatory material where the defendant indicates an...

Leave. EU Group Ltd and another v Information Commissioner [2022] EWCA Civ 109 What are the practical implications of this case? This decision distils the key considerations a court will weigh when deciding how to handle an appeal where one party is absent. In relation to appeals originating in the Upper Tribunal, it delivers a detailed examination of the scope of the Court of Appeal’s powers under the Tribunal Procedure ( Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008 ( TP( UT) Rules 2008), SI 2008/2698, and then tests whether the applicable thresholds are met on the facts, including whether the hearing was duly notified and whether proceeding serves the interests of justice. For appeals that do not come from the Upper Tribunal, the judgment confirms the court’s inherent jurisdiction to continue with an appeal despite a party’s non‑attendance. Finally, practitioners will welcome the court’s remarks on the...