Hundreds of former rugby players suing the game's governing bodies over brain injuries face the possibility that 95% of their claims could be thrown out, after a two-day hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Senior Master Cook, the judge managing the landmark litigation, retired to consider whether to strike out the vast majority of the first batch of 561 claimants. The proposed strikeouts stem from a failure to comply with a court order requiring claimants to disclose all available documents relating to their neurological testing (The Guardian).

The defendants in the case are World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union, the Welsh Rugby Union, the Rugby Football League, and the British Amateur Rugby League Association, split across two separate cases. They argued for strikeout on the grounds of "wholesale and widespread non-compliance" with the disclosure order.

Cook agreed that non-compliance had occurred, but he placed the blame firmly on solicitor Richard Boardman of the law firm Rylands Garth — not on the players. "The only complaint in this case is against the way Mr Boardman has handled the material," Cook said, adding that no claimant was responsible for the deficiencies.

The judge used a vivid analogy to explain the claimants' position: they were passengers in a vehicle being driven by somebody else, where the first bus driver goes off a cliff. The crisis point was reached, Cook said, because Boardman gave misleading evidence about whether he had complied with the court order. Cook said Boardman should have said he complied "as far as he was capable" instead of making "bland statements that the order had been complied with to the letter" and showing "not a bit of mea culpa."

Boardman, the owner of Rylands Garth, notified the court of his intention to "come off the record" after the claimants unanimously agreed to terminate their dealings with the firm. He was absent from court for the last day-and-a-half of hearings but remained notionally in charge until new solicitors are appointed. The law firm Leigh Day has been consulting on the case since February 2026 and is considering whether to take it on.

Cook said the solicitor change "raises more questions than it answers." He described the case as having entered "uncharted territory" because he could find no legal precedent for the situation before him, and said he needed to operate in "a careful and considered manner."

William Audland KC, representing the Rugby Football League, told the court: "There may be no one that is prepared to pick up this mess."

The case has been running for six years and has cost millions of pounds. It pits former players who say they suffered neurological damage from concussions and sub-concussive impacts during their careers against the bodies that govern professional and amateur rugby in both codes — union and league.

For the players and their families, the stakes are deeply personal. These are people who took to the pitch week after week and now live with the consequences — memory loss, early-onset dementia, mood disorders — and are seeking accountability and compensation through the courts.

The court is due to break for summer on Friday, 31 July 2026, and Cook is expected to deliver his decision on the strike-out application following the hearing. Even if the first tranche of claims is struck out, there are second groups of paused cases in both rugby league and union that could still proceed to trial.

What that means is simple but sobering: this judgment may reshape who can sue and how, but it will not end the legal battle over rugby and brain injury. That fight, in one form or another, will continue.