Companies

The ex-wife of accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith may have accessed his email account containing privileged communications with lawyers, a barrister for the former soldier told a judge on the eve of his defamation trial against Nine.

A Victoria Supreme Court judge weighing for the first time an application by a law firm for a percentage cut of recoveries in class actions has been told to reject the bid because group members would fare better under the firm's current no win, no fee funding arrangement.

Kraft has agreed to pay Bega $9.25 million as part of a settlement resolving a long-running battle over peanut butter trade dress rights, after the US consumer goods giant exhausted all its options for appealing a ruling that found Bega had acquired the rights to the trade dress.

A judge has given Generic Health more time to file its evidence in a multimillion-dollar dispute with drug makers Otsuka and Bristol-Myers Squibbs over the delayed launch of generic versions of their antipsychotic drug Abilify, but warned there had to be a cut-off point for preparing the decade-long dispute for trial.

Global resources giant BHP Group has lost an appeal in its fight to exclude foreign investors from a shareholder class action over the 2015 Fundao dam disaster, after arguing the class action regime applies only to those in Australia.

SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has lost a bid to shield his medical records from three publishers less than a week before his high-profile defamation case kicks off in the Federal Court.

The judge overseeing a conflicted remuneration class action against Suncorp has locked in a trial date for May next year over the protests of the applicants, saying it was "not a good look" for class actions to "hang" around.

Telecommunications companies Dodo and iPrimus must pay $2.5 million in penalties for making misleading claims about their NBN broadband speeds, a court has ruled.

Jo Dyer, a friend of the woman who accused Christian Porter of rape, has threatened to sue the former attorney-general for defamation over public statements he made during his now discontinued defamation battle against the ABC.

JPMorgan is fighting to keep details of failed settlement talks with ASIC under wraps in criminal cartel proceedings over a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement, as ANZ seeks to uncover whether the corporate regulator made a deal with the investment bank ahead of the cartel case being filed.