From the ongoing saga of the high-profile Christian Porter action against the ABC to “backyard” litigation testing the serious harm bar, defamation cases made headlines in 2022, with winners and losers alike shelling out millions to lawyers to protect their reputations.
A judge has found Nine should not face an out-of-time defamation action over an allegedly defamatory episode of A Current Affair that aired in 2019.
Courts stepped up their scrutiny of class action settlements in 2022, with judges grappling with difficult issues such as funding commissions in employment cases and whether settlements, even those worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were fair to group members.
Optus has won more time to bring a counterclaim in a $100 million lawsuit by mobile retailer TeleChoice alleging it was misled when the telecommunications giant claimed it would earn the same revenue as in an agreement that was being negotiated with Telstra.
A full bench of the Fair Work Commission has overturned a ruling that a Virgin Australia flight attendant was unfairly sacked, finding she breached the airline’s policies by sleeping on the job and stashing snacks in her crew bag.
A former partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers has been stripped of his registration as a tax agent after he was found to have leaked information obtained as part of confidential consultations with Treasury to reform tax law.
Qantas was entitled to take adverse action against ground crew to stave off the possibility of future industrial action, the airline has told the High Court in an appeal of a finding that it breached the Fair Work Act when it outsourced the crew’s work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nine Entertainment and Marcus Bastiaan have reached a settlement which includes a contribution to legal costs but no damages in a defamation case over a 60 Minutes segment accusing the former Liberal powerbroker of branch stacking.
Cruise operator Scenic Tours has made a bid to dramatically narrow the scope of a second class action brought over a series of European cruises that went ahead in 2018 despite a record-breaking drought that saw river levels drop so low they became impassable.
Three class action law firms have joined forces to run a landmark data breach complaint against Medibank, seeking compensation for up to 9.7 million affected customers.