Last year was an exciting one for class action lawyers, with monumental court decisions on competing cases, cross-jurisdictional spats, proportionality in settlements and the power of judges to decide how a recovery is distributed. Here, top class action litigators tell us what the most significant rulings of 2018 were and why the decisions will continue to matter this year.
In a situation a judge has called “extraordinary and troubling”, Deloitte’s files on failed construction company Hastie — sought as evidence by shareholders in a class action — have vanished from the accounting giant’s locked ‘litigation room’ and are now in the control of a single partner who refuses to return them.
Generic drug giant Teva has filed a lawsuit seeking to have German pharmaceutical company Boehringer’s patent for an inhalation capsule, which is used to deliver the active drug in its blockbuster Spiriva asthma inhaler, declared invalid.
Hotel booking aggregator Trivago, which last month admitted to breaching the consumer laws over its travel accommodation rankings, has lost a bid to keep secret internal documents that detail why the company made changes to its website and rejigged its advertising.
A judge has chosen a winner in a battle of law firms vying to run a massive shareholder class action against BHP over the fatal collapse of a dam at its Brazilian mine, saying the funding arrangement behind the successful case would best serve class members.
ANZ treasurer Rick Moscati was at the centre of a flurry of phone calls and meetings with underwriters and other bank executives on the day the underwriters agreed to pick up a $791 million shortfall in a $2.5 billion capital raising, an agreement which has led to groundbreaking cases by two regulators, according to a new court document.
Real estate advertiser REA Group has won an emergency injunction against Domain that blocks its rival from authorising the owner of the US website realestate.com to redirect Australian traffic to Domain.
Hotel booking aggregator Trivago has admitted it may have misled consumers into believing they would find the lowest hotel rate on an initial search of its site and that it had breached the Australian Consumer Law.
The high-stakes contest to run a shareholder class action against BHP has begun, with lawyers for three competing cases all arguing in Federal Court Monday that there can be only one winner.
ASIC has been given a little over a month to provide ANZ with documents it collected during the course of its investigation into a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement, as the bank, which is facing a related criminal cartel case, mulls whether to file an application to stay the regulator’s action.