Gill Phillips

Gill Phillips is a freelance editorial legal consultant. She did her undergraduate degree at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She is a qualified solicitor, and was the Guardian’s director of editorial legal services between 2009 and 2023, during which time she advised on a number of major investigations such as superinjunctions, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, phone hacking, the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers and the Uber Files. Before joining the Guardian, Gill was an in-house lawyer at the BBC and Times Newspapers, advising on a range of pre-publication legal content-related issues such as defamation, privacy, data protection, contempt and copyright, as well as handling post-publication complaints. She also sat for many years as a part-time Employment Tribunal judge and co-authored the CLP Legal Practice Guide on Employment Law until 2025. Gill is currently a consultant with Reviewed and Cleared, a visiting lecturer at City St George’s, University of London and is co-Editor of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists. She is also the author of a chapter on ethical issues on large-scale journalistic investigations in the Routledge Companion for Journalism Ethics. She holds an honorary law doctorate from London South Bank University.