A judge has found that a law firm failed in its duty to provide ongoing costs disclosures, in a fight over a legal bill that was double the size of the last estimate provided, rejecting an argument that the client should have understood the charges would climb.
As the head of Maurice Blackburn’s class actions group he helped win hundreds of millions of dollars for claimants and shaped the jurisprudence around the practice. As the Victorian Supreme Court’s newest judge, Andrew Watson has promised to keep up the fight for fair.
A prominent Perth lawyer acting for ex-defence minister Linda Reynolds in defamation cases against former staffer Brittany Higgins and her partner has been fined and reprimanded for two counts of professional misconduct in a separate matter.
The NSW Supreme Court has issued a practice note on forms of address that fails to invite parties to inform the court of their preferred pronouns, unlike two other state courts, one of which came under fire from ‘Harry Potter’ author JK Rowling last year.
Judges experience extreme levels of stress and secondary trauma, exacerbated by public comment that is often ignorant of what the job entails. The transparent approach taken by the judge presiding over the Bruce Lehrmann case may help pave the way to alleviating some of that stress, but more needs to be done, experts say.
K&L Gates continues to grow its corporate partnership, luring a private equity and M&A partner with international expertise from Johnson Winter Slattery.
A Sydney solicitor has lost his bid to summarily dismiss the legal watchdog’s case alleging he set up misleading crowdfunding pages seeking funding for class actions over government orders requiring mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, as well as another class action that was never filed.
ASIC chair Joe Longo has called on lawyers to be bold in their embrace of emerging technologies, saying lawyers “must be careful with generative AI but not afraid of it”.
A tribunal has found prominent barrister Charles Waterstreet guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct for sexually harassing three women, but declined to find he was unfit to practice after accepting expert evidence that undiagnosed mental illness “was the dominant causal factor” behind his actions.
The High Court has agreed to hear a case with implications for law firms that represent themselves in litigation, granting an appeal application by media mogul Bruce Gordon, a former client of Sydney firm Atanaskovic Hartnell.