By Paul Rodgers
Olswang partner Julia Palca and assistant Nicki Schroeder advised all the national newspapers except The Financial Times in their successful bid to thwart Home Secretary Jack Straw's attempt to stop the Lawrence report from being leaked.
Although national newspapers do team up from time to time to fight injunctions, it is highly unusual for the whole of Fleet Street to unite to work together in this way.
"We have never been instructed by all the national newspaper groups before," Palca said.
The Sunday Telegraph in-house solicitor Julia Braybrook and her colleagues at other newspapers called in Olswang on Sunday after Straw successfully secured an injunction preventing the paper from publishing excerpts of the report on Saturday night.
The Olswang team prepared a brief for Andrew Caldicott QC, from the chambers of Richard Hartley QC at 1 Brick Court, who travelled to the Dorchester Hotel where Mr Justice Rix was attending a wedding reception to persuade him to vary the injunction. The Home Office did not object.
Palca said the Home Office climbdown had significance beyond the immediate case. "It is an example of the Government recognising that we now live in global media environment. It is pointless having an article that you can read in Glasgow but not in Gloucester. In the old days an injunction in England could be enforced; now it can't be."
Louise Hayman, legal adviser to The Independent on Sunday, which was the first newspaper to join The Sunday Telegraph's fight, said the Home Office had "bungled" its injunction because the information had already been circulated by the time the Government secured the injunction.
The Treasury Solicitor's Office had briefed barrister Ian Burnett QC, from the chambers of Hugh Carlisle QC at 1 Temple Gardens, who phoned the request for the injunction to duty judge Mr Justice Bernard Rix at home. At 8.35pm, after The Sunday Telegraph in-house solicitor Julia Braybrook had unsuccessfully argued her case to the judge by telephone, the blanket injunction was granted. But by then, The Sunday Telegraph had already printed almost 300,000 copies, the story had been picked up by television, other national papers were re-writing it for their later editions and in Scotland, which was not covered by the order, it was available to all media outlets.
It was already too late, according to Hayman. "No order can put the genie back in the bottle," she said.
A Home Office spokesman admitted the injunction was mis-timed but described 'bungled' as "an unfair word".