News International has settled phone hacking cases in court this morning with 19 claimants, including Lord John Prescott and MP Chris Bryant.Some claimants will receive £100,000 compensation, but most settlements will remain within five figures, the court heard. Other claimants settling today include Sadie Frost, Danni Minogue and Ashley Cole.Solicitor Tamsin Allen, from Bindmans LLP, said: “The claimants now have some clarity about what happened to them in the years between 2000 and 2005 and satisfaction that justice has finally been done. Many of them have wondered for years how tabloid newspapers were able to obtain secret personal information about them, even suspecting their closest friends and relatives."Lives have been severely affected by this cavalier approach to private information and the law. News Group’s misguided decision to defend claims aggressively made matters worse. News Group have finally started to see sense and agreed to apologise and to pay compensation and costs in the majority of the remaining claims."The Leveson Inquiry will, in time, reveal to the public the full extent of the perversion of good journalistic standards at the News of the World during the phone-hacking years.”According to solicitor Mark Thomson, from Atkins Thomson, a number of claimants are still pursuing the matter to trial and, as a result, NGN will continue to disclose further information and evidence.Privacy proceedings were settled with large confidential sums being paid to Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford, leading to speculation about a cover-up, after the conviction of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman.In 2008, Stuart Kuttner of News of the World claimed “It happened once at the ‘News of the World’. The reporter was fired; he went to prison. The editor resigned”. In response to the Guardian’s allegations in July 2009 that phone hacking was widespread, Andy Hayman formerly the officer in charge of the phone hacking investigation, claimed in an article in The Times that there were a “handful” of victims and the police had “left no stone unturned”. John Yates supported that position.The News of the World said “From our own investigation, but more importantly that of the police, we can state with confidence that, apart from the matters referred to above, there is not and never has been evidence to support allegations that ‘News of the World’ journalists have accessed the voicemails of any individual” and no evidence of “systemic corporate illegality by News International to suppress evidence”.The PCC also investigated and concluded that phone-hacking was a minority activity, confined to one rogue reporter, and that the practice had been thoroughly investigated and stamped out.Convinced that this defence was false, a determined group of claimants and their lawyers, mostly acting on conditional fee agreements, issued proceedings from 2009 onwards.In early 2010, applications for disclosure were made in the case of Sienna Miller, forcing News Group to reveal evidence which referred to another senior journalist on the News of the World. This precipitated a new police investigation, and a dramatic shift in News Group’s public stance leading to limited admissions.As more and more new victims were alerted and joined the litigation Mr Justice Vos decided in April 2011 that all the claims should be heard together with certain lead claims being treated as test cases. News Group continued to defend almost all the claims.By October 2011, over 60 claims had been issued and 12 firms of solicitors were working together as a co-ordinated group. This group, in the face of significant opposition from News Group and its lawyers, obtained 9 separate disclosure orders from the Court. As a result, documents relating to the nature and scale of the conspiracy, a cover up and the destruction of evidence/email archives by News Group have now been disclosed to the Claimants. In the face of this overwhelming evidence, the “rogue reporter” position has disintegrated and the range, scale and extent of phone-hacking has become clear.Despite its public admissions and expressions of regret, News Group continued to defend the majority of claims, arguing that interception did not take place or that the information obtained was not confidential.News Group has never suggested there was any public interest whatsoever in voicemail interception.As a result of the pressure exerted on News Group in these claims, public admissions of wrongdoing have now been obtained from News International and proper compensation will be paid to every victim. News Group has agreed to compensation being assessed on the basis that senior employees and directors of NGN knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.News Group has undertaken to continue to search its electronic archives so that all available evidence relating to unlawful interceptions will eventually be disclosed to the Claimants.A number of Claimants are pursuing the actions to trial which commences on 13th February.*Sources: court; press release from Bindmans LLP