HT-2022-000132 - [2025] EWHC 1058 (TCC)

This document group contains 2 versions of an email chain which the claimants say relates to disclosure issue D25 (conflicts). In the emails, Ashley Gillard of Rothschild & Co, who acted as advisers to the GC, provides a general wording as to how conflicts would be dealt with. Jason Goodwin of the GC forwarded the email to Penny Williams and Sophie Newbould asking, in summary, whether this was OK. Sophie Newbould’s response was that [REDACTED].

The only one of these people who is part of the legal team is Sophie Newbould. It is again HL’s position that it was known or ought to have been known to BCLP that Ms Newbould was a lawyer and that it is, therefore, evident that her advice is legal advice. It should have been obvious that the disclosure of this privileged material was inadvertent.

It does not seem to me that it should have been at all obvious to BCLP and the reasonable solicitor that privileged material had been inadvertently disclosed. For the reasons I have given, I do not accept that BCLP could be expected to know – and in particular that all its reviewers could be expected to know – that persons who had not been identified as part of the legal team were lawyers. In the case of this email exchange, the sender of the email is not obviously seeking legal advice from a lawyer; the response is not identified as legal advice; and the person making the response asks for the issue to be “escalated” to someone who is not a lawyer – again with no indication that that is part of a process of seeking legal advice. The “escalation” is far more consistent with a senior commercial person being asked internally what he wants to do and the request for escalation is because “any approach away from the GC policy will require a higher level of approval”. I give permission for the claimants to use this document.