Media Lawyer Mark Lewis has over 25 years experience in privacy and defamation cases, representing some of the biggest names in media and sport.
But it was representing the non-celebrity victims of the phone-hacking at the News of the World where Mark found himself in the headlines.
Mark first rose to the public’s attention during the phone hacking scandal but he’d been making legal waves for the previous twenty years applying the legal motto “the bigger they are the harder they fall”.
From the start of his legal career when Thames TV saw how this young Manchester lawyer stopped the phenomenon of “shop squatting”, Mark has always led the way in breaking down the bullies who attacked his clients.
In 2008 Mark stood up to the bullies at Sheffield Wednesday to stop them suing their fans. Along the way issuing a press release that caused one claim to be dropped within the hour
Fighting to protect Dr Peter Wilmshurst who was sued by an American libel tourist, he defended vigorously, driving the Claimant under and meeting the then Lord Chancellor Jack Straw calling for a radical reform of libel law.
Mark created the civil claim of phonehacking, and went on to represent nearly 200 Claimants, closing Europe’s biggest newspaper along the way, negotiating a £3 million settlement for the Dowler family, 30 times greater than the previous highest award.
His reputation going so far that the Stock Exchange announcement that Mark was acting against the Mirror Group Newspapers and caused their share price to fall by 19%. Mark has gone on to represent countless individuals from celebrity to schoolteacher and sportsperson to politician.
More recently he has succeeded against George Galloway after he threatened to sue people for libeling him after a BBC TV Question Time and against Katie Hopkins for the food blogger & campaigner Jack Monroe and for schoolteacher Jackie Teale, the settlement announced within hours of the termination of Hopkins’ contract with the Daily Mail.
Mark’s scalps are staggering, the News of the World – closed, Press Complaints Commission- closed, Commissioner of the Met – gone.
As well as his battles against the press, Mark is fighting his own battle against Multiple Sclerosis as featured in the C4 documentary “searching for the miracle cure”
Mark has been profiled in numerous papers on both sides of the Atlantic including the WSJ, New York Times and LA Times as well as the Times, Guardian and Telegraph. As he says, “the only paper that I wasn’t in was the NoTW and that’s because I shut it down”.
One of the London Standard’s most influential, he appears In Who’s Who and Debretts.
He’s the David that took on Goliath.