Jeremy Clarke-Williams, Partner

• Email:j.c.clarke-williams@rjw.co.uk
• Telephone:020 7657 1423
• Office: London - 80-86 Gray's Inn Road
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Expertise

Jeremy is the partner in the Media and Libel Dept responsible for union and institutional clients and their members.  He joined RJW in 1986 and has been a partner since 1989.

Jeremy specialises in defamation, misuse of private information, media litigation, and reputation management.  His practice also includes probate litigation cases arising from disputed estates.

Experience

Jeremy acts for the members and head offices of Trade Unions, Membership Organisations, Staff Associations and the Police Federation, as well as for private individuals.  He advises both claimants and defendants.  Since 2007 Jeremy has been an Accredited Mediator.  His memberships include the London Solicitors’ Litigation Association, London Solicitors’ Golfing Society, British Library, Bush Hill Park Table Tennis Club, and the London Cycling Campaign.

Although defamation and privacy claims continue to form the bulk of Jeremy’s practice, pre publication work and reputation management is a growing area involving work to prevent damage being done before publication, advising clients who find themselves the subject of media attention on how best to deal with it, and libel reading books, articles and press releases before they are published.

Recent successful cases have included acting for a police officer accused in a national newspaper of sending racist hate mail to himself and others, an officer accused of fitting up a murder suspect in a national television programme, and advising specialist firearms officers on the media fallout from counter-terrorist operations.  Jeremy has also recently defended a trade union sued for libel by an official in another union, recovered damages for a nurse wrongly accused of grossly unhygienic practice in a national Sunday newspaper, and advised an internationally renowned musician wrongly accused of human trafficking.

Career

Over the years, Jeremy has successfully represented clients against virtually every national newspaper and television company, as well as a wide array of local papers, magazines, radio stations, book publishers and private individuals (ranging from litigants-in-person to solicitors).

Publications

Jeremy wrote “A Practical Guide to Libel and Slander” with Lorna Skinner, which was published by Butterworths in 2003.  He is also the defamation contributor to the Civil Court Service (The Brown Book) published twice yearly by Jordans.

Media and Legal Contributions

Jeremy is recognised as an expert in defamation and regularly writes articles for, and contributes comment to, both the legal and national media.  He implemented and chaired the committee which drafted the Defamation Pre-Action Protocol, he is a member of the Law Society’s Defamation Reference Group, and he chaired the Law Society’s Committee on the implementation of the Defamation Act 1996.

A number of Jeremy’s libel actions have been reported cases involving issues of key legal importance including three important cases on meaning Chase v News Group Newspapers Ltd [2003] EMLR II, Mapp v News Group Newspapers Ltd [1998] QB 520 and Geenty v Channel 4 [1998] EMLR 524.  Most recently, he acted for the intervener in the House of Lords hearing in Ashley & Anor v Chief Constable of Sussex [2008] UK HL 23 April 2008.

Funding

The RJW defamation team has played a leading role in developing the use of Conditional Fee Agreements to fund defamation work for use by private individuals and Unions and Institutions.  Jeremy is on the panel appointed by the Dept of Constitutional Affairs/Civil Justice Council looking at Conditional Fee Agreements in defamation.