Gill Phillips
Gill Phillips is a media law specialist. She currently works in-house as the Director of Editorial Legal Services for Guardian News & Media Limited (publishers of the Guardian and Observer newspapers and theguardian.com). She advises on a range of content-related matters including defamation, privacy, data protection, copyright, contempt of court and reporting restrictions. She read History (Part I) and Law (Part II) at Selwyn College Cambridge. She trained at Coward (now Clifford) Chance and spent three years PQE in the litigation department there specialising in commercial / civil litigation. In 1987, she escaped from private practice, joining the BBC as an in-house lawyer dealing with pre and post publication and litigation matters. Between 1996/7 she was an in-house lawyer at News Group Newspapers (The Sun & The News of the World) before moving, in 1997, to the College of Law, where she lectured in Civil and Criminal Litigation and Employment. In September 2000, she joined Times Newspapers Limited (publishers of The Times and The Sunday Times) as an in-house lawyer, becoming Head of Litigation. In May 2009, she moved to Guardian News & Media Limited. She was a member of the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Libel Reform. She was involved in the Trafigura super injunction case and was a member of the Master of the Rolls Injunction Committee. She has advised Guardian News & Media on phone-hacking, Wikileaks, the Leveson Inquiry, the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden, the HSBC files, the Panama and Paradise Papers and, most recentlyy, the Pegasus Project. She is the author of a chapter on ethical issues in large-scale journalistic investigations in the Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics. She also sits as a part-time Employment Tribunal Judge and co-authors the University of Law Employment Law handbook.