And so it has come to pass. Trinity Mirror has suffered a punishing financial blow for the activities of staff who covertly intercepted voicemail messages and it is likely to suffer further blows in the near future.
The publisher of the Daily and Sunday Mirror and Sunday People had been hoping that the hacking victims would receive much smaller awards.
But the total £1.2m compensation for just eight people amounts to a terrible shock for chief executive Simon Fox and his board.
The scale of the privacy awards is, frankly, astonishing. Consider this list: Sadie Frost, £260,250; Paul Gascoigne, 188,250; Robert Ashworth, £201,250; Lucy Taggart, £157,250; Shane Richie, £155,000; Shobna Gulati, £117,500; Alan Yentob, £85,000; and Lauren Alcorn, £72,500.
The ruling by Mr Justice Mann will now provide a framework of reference to calculate scores of similar civil actions now in the pipeline and, conceivably, others set to sue.
To put what the judge calls “very substantial” payouts in context, we need to recall that Max Mosley received just £60,000 for his privacy action against the News of the World, which had revealed his part in a sado-masochistic orgy.
The intrusion into Mosley’s privacy - involving video footage posted online and a wholly inaccurate claim of the orgy having a Nazi theme - would appear far greater than that suffered by any of the eight Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) victims.
That is not, of course, to minimise the hurt they suffered. But the comparison does suggest a legal imbalance.
It is also noteworthy that the payouts dwarf those paid to hacking victims by Rupert Murdoch’s British organisation, News UK, which published the now-defunct News of the World.
The difference is that those NoW cases were settled out of court. Its victims accepted lower sums than the equivalent Mirror octet.
Fox became chief executive long after these instances of hacking occurred. Many of the board members were not around either, and all three titles have different editors.
But they are all paying for the sins of the past and must wonder whether investors will begin to turn their backs on the company due to the likely effect of coming legal settlements.
Unsurprisingly, as I write, the share price has fallen by about 4%. But it could have been worse. This suggests that investors are, for the moment, remaining calm.
