Schillings
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| Limited Liability Partnership | |
| Industry | Law |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters | London, WC1 United Kingdom |
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Area served
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United Kingdom, international |
| Services | Legal advice and Advocacy |
| Website | www.schillingspartners.com |
Schillings (originally Schilling & Lom) is an international reputation and privacy consultancy staffed by reputation, privacy and family lawyers, risk consulting, cyber security and intelligence specialists. The company is an Alternative Business Structure (ABS) and regulated and authorised by the United Kingdom's Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). It employs 33 lawyers, risk managers and IT security consultants and offers services covering risk consulting, legal services and IT security.
Back in the early 80s, long before the development of privacy law, Schillings senior partner Keith Schilling used to work for Wright Webb Syrett in partnership with entertainment lawyer Nicholas Lom and legendary show-business and media lawyer and racing car collector Oscar Beuselinck who was the father of actor Paul Nicholas as well as a good friend of actress Anna Wing. Beuselinck himself had talent for performing, loved film and theatre, stayed in a guest room at the Groucho Club during the week and "could easily be taken for an actor playing a Los Angeles lawyer in an American daytime soap." When in early 1984 Beuselinck left Wright Webb to join Davenport Lyons, Keith Schilling and Nicholas Lom founded their own practice, Schillings. It focused largely on media law, libel, and privacy protection.
Starting in 2010, Schillings became a defamation and privacy practice. It was called by Index on Censorship as "the scourge of many a Fleet Street editor" for obtaining anonymised gagging orders to protect celebrity clients' privacy. In the early 2010s, the firm began to move away from pure media and libel work towards reputation protection for a largely corporate, non-celebrity clientele.
In 2012 Schillings acquired the information security firm Vigilante Bespoke. In March 2013 the firm was granted two Alternative Business Structure licenses, one for the Schillings partnership and one for Schillings Corporate Limited which owns Vigilante Bespoke.
In September 2013 Schillings restructured its organisation and is now an integrated legal, risk management, IT security and investigation business.
In 2004 Schillings were instructed by Naomi Campbell in Campbell v MGN Ltd, a widely reported case that shaped privacy culture in England and Wales. Campbell sought damages for personal injury after Daily mirror published photographs of her leaving a rehabilitation clinic, following public denials that she was a recovering drug addict. The photographs were published in a publication run by MGN. The key issue in Campbell v MGN Ltd was that some of the information was wrong but it did not disentitle the writ from succeeding. Schillings brought a claim for breach of confidence engaging section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which required the court to operate compatibly with the European Convention on Human Rights. The desired result was a ruling that the English tort action for breach of confidence, subject to the ECHR provisions upholding the right to private and family life, would require the court to recognise the private nature of the information, and hold that there was a breach of her privacy. Rather than challenge the disclosure of the fact she had been a drug addict, Schillings challenged the disclosure of information about the location of her Narcotics Anonymous meetings. The photographs, they argued, formed part of this information. It was held that Campbell's Article 8 rights outweighed the Defendant’s Article 10 rights, so that publication of the additional information was an infringement of Campbell's Article 8 rights for which she was entitled to damages.
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