Just in response to a question asked on the previous thread - what do each of the claimants need to prove to establish their law suit was brought in time?
As is fairly well known, the standard limitation period is six years. If a claim is not brought within this time period, then it is considered out of time, and that is a compete defence to the claims. This is a rule of public policy, and is often applied by the courts. It is intended to give a claimant plenty of time to bring a claim, and means potential defendants don't have the posibility of claims hanging over them for years, and the court is not trying to decide cases based on stale evidence.
To counter any potential unfairness, where key facts about the possible claim are deliberately concealed from the claimant, time does not start running until the claimant has discovered the concealment, or “could with reasonable diligence have discovered it”.
That last bit is important here. The claimants here all argue that they were justified in only filing in 2022 because the Mail deliberately covered up its illegal information gathering practices, by vague invoices, euphemistic wording in its articles, and lying to the Leveson enquiry. And because they are the ones looking for an exception to the normal limitation period being applied, they have to prove that they fall into that exception. So a key issue will be what they each knew prior to 2022, and whether that knowledge means they could reasonably have discovered the facts underlying their claims.
Legally though, the question is not whether they should have discovered the facts earlier, but whether they could have done so. The court expects them to be reasonably diligent, and also to know things which a reasonably diligent investigation would have discovered.
So that is what the judge will have to decide here - whether each of the claimants suspected enough about the Mail’s articles and how they had been sourced to have undertaken some investigation to found a possible claim prior to 2022.