An alliance of lawyer pressure groups will this week make a last-ditch bid to halt the government’s civil litigation reforms.

One of their number, the Professional Negligence Lawyers Association (PNLA), has called for the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill to be delayed pending investigations into national media reporting of the changes. It has complained to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) that some broadcasters and newspapers have failed properly to report the full potential impact of the reforms, because they stand to benefit from them commercially.

The allegation is contained in a late-December submission by the PNLA to the Commons joint committee on privacy and injunctions, which is examining how the statutory and common law on privacy and the use of anonymity injunctions and super-injunctions has operated in practice.

The submission focuses on sections 43 and 45 of the bill, which will abolish recovery of success fees and after-the-event insurance premiums in all civil litigation, with exceptions for personal injury and clinical negligence. The reforms will save media organisations huge sums in legal costs and damages to claimants in defamation and privacy cases, the association points out.

In a letter to the PCC, the PNLA asked: 'Is it within the PCC’s remit to make a determination that a group of newspapers has set out to change the law by a campaign of restricted reporting and adverse comment on claimant defamation lawyers?’

The PCC replied that it was not, pointing out that newspapers are entitled to be partisan. In respect of competition law, the PNLA believes media company directors may have been conflicted because they are legally obliged to act in their companies’ best interests - and balanced reporting of the government’s policy on conditional fee agreements (CFAs) may have compromised this. The OFT has yet to decide whether to pursue the matter.

The other organisations involved in the eleventh-hour lobbying effort are claimant group Lawyers for Media Standards (LMS), the Access to Justice Action Group and the Insolvency Lawyers Association. Along with environment litigation specialist Neil Stockdale of Hugh James Solicitors, representatives of this self-styled 'Gang of Five’ are due to meet justice minister Jonathan Djanogly and Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who is taking part 2 of the bill through the Lords, tomorrow.

In its own submission to the joint committee, LMS lists high-profile individuals who may have been denied access to justice without the benefit of the CFA regime. They include: the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler; most of the claimants who alleged their phones were hacked by the News of the World; and Sylvia Henry, the Baby P social worker who was falsely accused of negligence by various newspapers.

LMS added: 'While we welcome the committee subjecting the substantive law of privacy to scrutiny, we are concerned that any proposals that are made will be inconsequential if all bar the richest are denied access to justice to the law in the first place.’