A recent law.com story, “News Corp. Financials Show Phone-Hacking Legal Bills Nearing $200 Million” reports that News Corp. has paid our nearly $200 million in legal costs over the phone hacking scandal to date, according to the company’s latest financial results.  The company said it could not forecast what its expenditure would be on legal fees and external advisers working on the hacking scandal for a full year.

The figures, contained within the company’s results for the last three months on 2011, show the media giant paid out $87 million in legal fees and investigations into phone-hacking at its now defunct newspaper News of the World during the period up to Dec. 31 last year.  The costs come in addition to a total of $108 million News Corp. spent during the previous quarter, $17 million of which had not been previously disclosed.  The costs principally went toward restructuring its U.K. newspaper business after the closure of News of the World.

Around 85 percent of the costs were attributed to “fees to outside lawyers and advisers working on various investigations and committee hearings in the UK,” with the remaining 15 percent relating to legal settlements, largely paid to phone-hacking victims, amounting to around $15 million.  The legal bill was substantially higher than News Corp. had expected, and the company said that it could not forecast what its expenditure would be on legal fees and external advisers on the hacking scandal for the full year.