Treasury Wine Estates has challenged a ruling that Maurice Blackburn did not breach its obligations by using material from a now settled class action against it to draft new class action pleadings.
The corporate regulator will not take former AMP chair Catherine Brenner to court after investigating her conduct as part of probes that are expected to lead to at least five cases against the wealth management firm before the end of the year.
The High Court has denied a special leave application by the former directors of defunct financial advisory Storm Financial, after the Full Federal Court upheld a ruling finding they had breached their duties to eleven vulnerable investors by providing an inappropriate, one-size-fits-all model of investment advice.
Barrister Norman O’Bryan has accepted that he should be struck from the roll of legal practitioners after dropping his defence mid-trial against claims of professional misconduct as senior counsel for a class action financed by the late Mark Elliott, but the consequences for the once high-flying silk might not end there.
Former financial adviser Graeme Miller has been jailed for six years after pleading guilty to misappropriating $1.865 million in client funds in what a judge described as a “cruel and deceitful betrayal”.
A recent decision in ASIC’s case against ANZ has highlighted the potential risks of waiver of client legal privilege, with the Federal Court observing that the distinctions can be “fine”. While ANZ avoided having to disclose its legal advice to the regulator, the decision is a reminder of the potential pitfalls of referring to legal advice in correspondence, and that pleading a state of mind in litigation carries risks from a privilege perspective, says Hall & Wilcox partner Jacob Uljans.
AMP has been hit with a cliass action by a group of financial planners over changes to its buyer of last resort policy last year, which cut the number of authoried advisers and retreated from a promise to buy back their businesses at a price based on a set multiple.
The Murray Goulburn class action has been cited repeatedly in the current parliamentary inquiry into class actions and litigation funding. For some, the return generated by Omni Bridgeway, which funded the action, is Exhibit A in the case that litigation funders make too much money. To others – including the one person in the best position to judge – it is nothing of the sort, says Clive Bowman of Omni Bridgeway.
Online odd jobs platform Service Seeking has been fined $600,000 for falsely representing that reviews on its platform were written by customers when in fact they were written by the businesses themselves.
The law firm at the centre of a coronavirus outbreak linked to its Melbourne headquarters is still expecting its Sydney partners to work from the office despite warnings from NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian that the state had reached a “critical point”.