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Richard Boardman, the lawyer at the heart of rugby’s concussion lawsuit, is quitting the case, leaving hundreds of players who are suing rugby’s authorities over brain injuries allegedly caused by the sport in limbo.
Boardman, whose firm Rylands Garth has represented more than 1,000 claimants across rugby union and league since the start of the legal action in late 2020, notified the court that he was stepping down from the case.
“I am writing to inform you and the defendants that my intention is to come off the record in this litigation and I have started taking steps to do so.”
New representation will now need to be found for the claimants, including World Cup winners Phil Vickery and Steve Thompson.
Leigh Day, the firm that 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”.
Telegraph Sport understands that many of the players in the case were unaware of the potential change in representation before it was announced in court, where the defendants – World Rugby, the Rugby Union and the Welsh Rugby Union as well as the Rugby Football League – are applying to have dozens of players’ claims struck out over Rylands’ failure to disclose medical records.
In the claimants’ skeleton argument, they have asked the court for a “period of transition” under their potential new representation and that the conduct of Boardman, who has been repeatedly criticised by the court, should not affect their claim.
“This change of solicitor on the record not only demonstrates how seriously the claimants take the criticisms levelled at them, but that there will be a completely different regime going forward in which both the court and the defendants can have full confidence,” the document read.
It remains to be seen how Boardman’s departure will affect the case. Dozens of players’ claims were facing being struck off in the case management hearings scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday because of incomplete medical records.
Telegraph Sport previously revealed how Will Green, a former England and Wasps prop, had been pressured into joining the claim by Rylands. Green subsequently had an independent brain scan showing no sign of dementia. “They still pressed me to sign up for the group action, sending multiple emails pressuring me to sign up,” Green said. “To do so would have perpetrated a fraud on the court because the claimant’s medical experts’ diagnosis was found to be wrong. Yet, despite this, the claimant still tried to pursue me to sign up to the group litigation.”
Boardman’s conduct was frequently criticised by Senior Master Cook, the judge presiding over the case management hearings. Last year, Cook stated that Boardman had a “complete misunderstanding of his responsibilities” and that “he seems to have a problem with the English language” over repeated failures to disclose material to the defendants. Rylands later appealed against his judgment that they needed to disclose all necessary medical records to the defendants, arguing that Cook had “erred in law and misdirected himself”.
Rylands lost the appeal and were further admonished by the appeal judge Lord Justice Dias, who stated: “The repeated extensions, the strong indications by the judge from early in proceedings of the need for active progression of the litigation, the gross misunderstandings of Mr Boardman about his disclosure duties and the associated puzzling nature of these fundamental misconceptions with his unconvincing explanations, [meant] it was entirely reasonable in my judgment for the judge to lack confidence in the adequacy or legal accuracy of the approach to disclosure.”
Rylands – which was renamed Rylands Garth – was set up by Boardman in 2020, specifically to take on a lawsuit against rugby’s authorities for failing in their duty of care to protect players from repeated concussive and sub-concussive blows during their careers. Comparisons were quickly drawn with the NFL’s $765 million (£580m) settlement with a group of former players over similar concussion-related claims.
While group litigation orders in England tend to be pursued by specialised, highly resourced law firms, Boardman is the sole director of Rylands Garth, whose case is being underwritten by litigation funder Asertis. It is estimated that testing fees alone amount to more than £3.5m while Rylands Garth has had 11 cost hearings awarded against them so far.
Richard Boardman: The lawyer who has quit rugby’s concussion lawsuit
Richard Boardman became the go-to solicitor for former rugby players who fear their careers have condemned them to the cruellest of diseases.
After the National Football League (NFL) agreed a $765m (£572m) 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 claim 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, two and a half 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 (RFU) and the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU). Other claims were also lodged against the Rugby Football League (RFL).
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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