Harbottle & Lewis has been allowed to defend its controversial role in the phone-hacking saga, after former client News International agreed to free it from client confidentiality requirements.

News International last night (20 July) authorised the West End firm to answer questions from the police and Parliamentary select committees – marking a U-turn on its previous stance, which had seen the company refuse Harbottle permission to waive client confidentiality and speak out about its role.

Harbottle had issued a statement the previous day expressing "great regret" that News International would not waive client confidentiality and allow it to speak out in the wake of evidence presented by News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch and his son James to a Parliamentary committee.

The firm was engaged by News International in 2007 as part of an internal investigation into whether phone-hacking spread further than royal editor Clive Goodman. It concluded that a cache of emails it reviewed did not show reasonable grounds for believing hacking went beyond Goodman.

News International's statement said: "News Corporation's management and standards committee (MSC) can confirm that News International has today authorised the law firm Harbottle & Lewis to answer questions from the Metropolitan police service and Parliamentary select committees in respect of what they were asked to do.

"The MSC is authorised to co-operate fully with all relevant investigations and inquiries in the News of the World phone hacking case, police payments and all other related issues across News International, as well as conducting its own enquiries where appropriate."

Harbottle has faced additional scrutiny of its role this week in further Parliamentary testimony by Lord Macdonald QC, the former director of public prosecutions, who had been asked to review the emails which were recovered by News International executives earlier this year. Macdonald told MPs: "I cannot imagine anyone looking at that file and not seeing evidence of crime on its face."

News International's U-turn comes as US parent company News Corp drafts in additional legal advisers in the US.

Legal Week affiliate title The Am Law Daily reports that US firm Debevoise & Plimpton has been hired by News Corp's independent directors to provide oversight of the MSC, the independent committee charged with leading the company's response to the wider hacking claims. Debevoise partners Mary Jo White and Michael Mukasey are heading up the US firm's team.

White, one of the US's highly regarded white collar crime specialists, chairs Debevoise's litigation department and is the former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, while Mukasey served as US attorney general under George W Bush and was hired by the US Chamber of Commerce earlier this year to lobby Congress to weaken the impact of foreign bribery laws on companies.

News Corp has also hired Washington DC litigator Mark Mendelsohn of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, an expert on the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), according to the Wall Street Journal. News Corp could face investigation under the FCPA because of the allegations of police bribery carried out by News of the World journalists.

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