I like lawyers. They always smile, even when they’re not actually billing you.

Big hats off to Andy Scott of the LSE‘s law department for bringing together a terrific cast of what we in journalism would – rather unimaginatively – call “top lawyers.”

It was Chatham House rules, but the lawyers thought:

• David Eady is waging a one-judge privacy campaign based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights trumping Article 10
• Privacy needs parliamentary intervention
• Privacy damages remain minimal
• CFAs (No win, no fee) haven’t increased libel actions and the cost of insurance premiums (in case poorer claimants lose) still restricts access to justice
• A sense of growing ‘opportunities’ in copyright and privacy
• A dissatisfaction with the slowness of the whole process

Lawyers didn’t talk about:

• Pre-emptive injunctions
• Possible US Free Speech Protection Act
• Weren’t interested in ISPs, Google and Yahoo
• Weren’t very interested in ‘freedom of speech’ issues
• Mainly saw regulation of journalism as an ‘old media’ issue involving revelations over the private lives of celebrities, politicians, etc.