LONDON — An e-mail to Rupert Murdoch’s son James that referred to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid was deleted from his computer less than two weeks before the police opened their current investigation into phone hacking, lawyers said Wednesday.

The deletion was part of an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program” in which accounts were “being prepared for the migration to a new e-mail system,” said Linklaters, a law firm representing News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch media empire.

The e-mail was a chain of messages sent June 7, 2008, to James Murdoch, head of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, warning that the potential legal fallout from hacking at The News of the World was “as bad as we feared.”

Linklaters disclosed the existence of the e-mail to a House of Commons committee investigating phone hacking in December. Mr. Murdoch said that while he received and answered the e-mail, he did not scroll all the way down through the chain and so did not read everything in it.