Roll on Friday
In a heartwarming display of openness, Hogan Lovells accidentally disclosed thousands of documents to BCLP which can be used against its client.
HogLove is acting for the UK’s Gambling Commission, which is being sued by media magnate Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell company for rejecting his bid to run the National Lottery.
A High Court judgment revealed this week that over 4,000 privileged or partially privileged documents had been inadvertently disclosed to Desmond’s legal team.
Dozens of lawyers at Hogan Lovells and another firm, Capital Law, had reviewed 330,000 documents in the course of the disclosure exercise, and provided 53,000 of them to BCLP.
The realisation they had been too generous started small when HogLove informed BCLP in December 2024 that 35 documents had been wrongly disclosed.
A few days later it wrote a second time to say it had identified another 80 or so documents which had been accidentally sent over.
BCLP replied that it would hold off showing its client the disputed documents while it carried out its own review (although it got one out under the wire – a particularly contentious document was pinged across to a Northern & Shell representative “about 90 minutes” before Hogan Lovell’s first alert arrived).
