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The solicitor at the heart of rugby’s multi-million-pound concussion lawsuit has been forced out of the case amid claims of providing “misleading evidence” to the court, leaving more than 1,000 players in limbo.
Claimants from union and league will discover whether their cases will be struck out on Thursday after their barrister, Susan Rodway KC, admitted they are “staring into the precipice”.
The judge repeatedly admonished solicitor Richard Boardman, whose firm Rylands Garth commenced the legal action in late 2020, for multiple failures to disclose all medical records to the defendants, highlighting his “widespread non-compliance” and “misleading evidence”.
A statement on behalf of the playing group in the league and union cases announced that they had “unanimously agreed to terminate the instruction of Rylands Garth”. New representation will now need to be found for the claimants, who include World Cup winners Phil Vickery and Steve Thompson. “We concluded it was in the best interests of the claimants to appoint a firm with the resources and specialist expertise required to lead the litigation through its next phase,” the players’ statement continued.
Boardman’s withdrawal as the lead solicitor leaves the case in a precarious position, even if he claims to want to continue acting as a consultant. Leigh Day, the firm who represented dozens of gymnasts in their lawsuit against British Gymnastics, has been consulting on the case and is “currently engaging in a period of due diligence in order to decide whether they would be in a position to take over subject to clients’ agreement”.
Should hundreds of cases be thrown out, as requested by World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) as well as the Rugby Football League because of the lack of disclosure about the neurological testing process, then the case would collapse before going to trial.
Rodway claims the potential change in solicitor is “significantly important because that is the claimants taking matters into their own hands” as recognition of the Senior Master Jeremy Cook’s displeasure with Boardman’s conduct throughout the case, promising a “completely different regime going forward in which both the Court and the Defendants can have full confidence”.
It is six years since Boardman first launched legal action against World Rugby, the RFU and the WRU for failing in their duty of care to protect players from repeated concussive and sub-concussive blows during their careers. Rugby’s authorities have denied any wrongdoing.
Rylands has repeatedly missed deadlines imposed by Senior Master Cook to disclose the claimants’ medical records which would enable the defendants to select their lead claimants if and when the case went to trial. “The point is Mr Boardman has gone on witness statement and made an affidavit earlier on in these proceedings categorically stating that he has complied with his duty and categorically stating he has complied with his order,” Senior Master Cook said. “It turns out he hasn’t. Then he does again.
“It is not the defendants being difficult for the sake of being difficult. It is the defendants wanting to ensure the process has integrity, that we can rely on the evidence and it is full and complete. This is at the core of it. What is concerning to the court is that core integrity of the process has to be satisfied and what you are producing properly reflects the nature of the material.”
Senior Master Cook was at pains to absolve the players of any blame, describing them as “passengers on a vehicle driven by someone else”, instead focusing his ire on Boardman. “This court is more concerned with widespread non-compliance and misleading evidence from a solicitor...nobody is going to strike anybody out for a single reference here or there.”
Telegraph Sport previously revealed how Will Green, a former England and Wasps prop, said he had been pressured into joining the claim by Rylands despite having an independent brain scan showing that he had no sign of dementia.
Rodway claimed that the defendants had received enough material to be able to select their lead claimants and argued that they should not be denied justice based on a few missing documents. “These are not [claims] are not for double glazing that has gone wrong but catastrophic brain injury,” Rodway said. In their skeleton argument, they continue that case.
“This litigation is of significant public interest and societal importance for the continuance of contact/collision sports in the UK,” the skeleton argument reads. “It would be highly undesirable for a significant number of the former players to lose their claims on procedural grounds, particularly where any irregularity has been cured and the claimants and their representatives have made clear their intention to work co-operatively with the defendants and learn from any past errors.”
However, Senior Master Cook was sceptical that new representation for the claimants had been secured having received no official notification from Leigh Day. “Mr Boardman is the solicitor on record,” Senior Master Cook said. “If he is the solicitor on record, he is responsible for the conduct the litigation at present. No other solicitor has gone on record. There has been mention of other solicitors taking over this case but so far that is rumour and supposition.
“What impact will that have? If a new firm of solicitors is going to take over the conduct of this case, it will mean getting up to speed. We have a hearing set in November. The point I am making is that I have been frustrated form day one with the progress of this litigation. I simply make the point that I expect and everyone expects that the pace is to be picked up and if there are dramatic change that they do not interfere with timetables.”
The case-management hearing continues on Thursday.
Richard Boardman: The lawyer who has quit rugby’s concussion lawsuit
Richard Boardman became the go-to solicitor for former rugby players who feared their careers had condemned them to the cruellest of diseases.
After the National Football League (NFL) agreed a $765m (£580m) settlement brought by more than 4,500 American football players over concussion-related brain injuries in 2013, it was only a matter of time before a similar action was brought in rugby union given the similar injury rates in the sport.
It was Boardman who took that mantle in England and Wales after forming Rylands Legal in February 2020 and Rylands Garth two-and-a-half years later.
Who is Richard Boardman?
According to the latter’s website, Boardman qualified as a solicitor in 2009 and worked at “various Magic Circle and US law firms” in the years before setting up his own firm. Information submitted to Companies House states that, during the interim, he was a “television producer” and founded a variety of now-dissolved companies, including Black Star TV, Fink Media, Smudge Entertainment and Racine Media.
In December 2020, it was announced that 2003 Rugby World Cup-winner Steve Thompson was among a group of eight players taking legal action against rugby’s authorities for what they claimed was a failure to protect them from the dangers of concussion. The hope was to build enough numbers to launch a group litigation order (GLO), which allows multiple individuals with similar claims to take a collective action against the same defendant or defendants.
Boardman was successful in gathering clients and, 2½ years after the initial announcement, the first High Court case management hearing took place in the lawsuit brought by 169 former rugby players against World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union and the Welsh Rugby Union. Other claims were also lodged against the Rugby Football League.
It quickly became clear that there were problems in the case, with the judge, Senior Master Jeremy Cook, admonishing the parties for a slow exchange of information which he likened to the “wheels of death on a computer, going nowhere”. He was especially critical of Rylands’ failure to provide the rugby authorities with the claimants’ medical records, which he described as a “gaping hole”.
Why has this case been controversial?
In October 2024, Telegraph Sport revealed how Boardman had been accused in court of pressuring a former England international to lie about having dementia. During an extraordinary hearing that raised questions about how he was recruiting potentially vulnerable ex-players to join his “no win, no fee” action, it emerged Rylands sued Will Green for thousands of pounds in legal and medical costs after the former Wasps prop refused to sign up to the landmark litigation.
A judge dismissed Rylands’ claim, ruling that it had misrepresented its services to Green and that a letter of engagement it sent him laying these out was “at very best vague, muddled and highly confusing”. Green also accused Boardman of committing multiple breaches of the Solicitors Regulation Authority code of conduct – an allegation the SRA confirmed it would examine. A spokesman for Rylands said: “We represent around 900 claimants who have suffered a form of brain injury playing the sports they adored. None have been asked to pay anything for their testing. This was a straightforward small debt claim, which was handled by a third-party law firm.”
Boardman received a remarkable dressing down by Senior Master Cook in July last year, when he was censured for failing to grasp “the English language” and showing a “complete misunderstanding of his responsibilities”. The judge upheld a complaint that there had been “serious and widespread failures to comply” with court orders, particularly in the rugby league case. By December, hundreds of complainants were in danger of their claims being struck out after Rylands failed to overturn a ruling ordering it to disclose material to the defendants by late October. At a further case management hearing in March, Cook told Rylands: “I have no intention of removing the flame from your feet given your performance to date.” Come May, rugby’s authorities moved to strike out any players from the motion whose records they had yet to receive.
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