Law firms Maurice Blackburn and Phi Finney McDonald have stepped back from a proposed consolidation of their class actions against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and want to run their own cases again, but now with “harmonised” pleadings.
Maurice Blackburn has criticised a judge’s decision to award carriage of a massive shareholder class action against BHP over the fatal collapse of a dam at its Brazilian mine to “less experienced” firm Phi Finney McDonald, lodging what is now the second high-stakes challenge to a ruling permanently staying a competing class action.
Visa has resolved a lawsuit by a fintech founder alleging it misused its market power by banning the use of dynamic currency conversion services in several countries, including Australia and the US.
A judge has signed off on a $16.4 million settlement of a class action against Cash Converters, but not before scrapping a clause he said tied the court’s hands by making the deal conditional on the appointment of Maurice Blackburn as scheme administrator.
Lawyerly spoke to ten class action experts on the release of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s highly anticipated report into the class action regime. While many of the ALRC’s proposals were expected — and welcomed as sensible — others were greeted with concern and skepticism. Here, we look at the most controversial of the 24 recommendations.
Law firms would be able to charge contingency fees and the corporate disclosure obligations would go under the microscope as part of a shake-up of the class action regime recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has postponed the release of preliminary findings from its review into the proposed merger of telco giants TPG and Vodafone Hutchison Australia, and has blamed the companies for the delay.
AMP has retained Herbert Smith Freehills — one of its go-to law firms — to represent it in legal proceedings by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission seeking documents from Clayton Utz as part of an ongoing investigation of the wealth manager’s fees-for-no-service conduct.
Spotless Services violated the Fair Work Act by failing to pay redundancy for workers employed at Perth International Airport, a court has found, in a ruling that clarifies when employers are on the hook for redundancy payments.
From a record-setting funder’s cut to the first call for ‘“proportionality”, last year saw a number of groundbreaking judgments approving class action settlements worth more than half a billion dollars. Here are the 10 biggest settlements of 2018, and the law firms and funders that negotiated them.