The power of courts to choose a single winner from a contest of competing class actions is not the likely target of the High Court in taking up a challenge to last year’s beauty parade of shareholder proceedings against AMP, but the analysis behind the decision to award Maurice Blackburn the prize could face scrutiny, experts say.
The High Court has agreed to weigh in on a decision last year to pick Maurice Blackburn’s case as the winner of a beauty parade of shareholder class actions against AMP over the wealth manager’s controversial fees for no service.
A judge has ordered the Rinehart family to enter mediation in their feud over a $4 billion trust, saying it was “overwhelmingly in the interests of the administration of justice” to seek an end to the long-running and bitter dispute.
The NSW Supreme Court has approved a settlement in Australia’s first privacy class action, which was brought against the NSW government over a data breach by a contractor who sold private details of 130 ambulance workers to personal injury law firms, including Bannister Law.
The liquidators of Atlas Construction have won access to advice supplied by law firm Ashurst as they pursue examination proceedings against two of the company’s former directors.
A Sydney-based development firm has won limited access to legal documents from Norton Rose Fulbright in a property dispute over redevelopment of the Sydney Fish Markets and a $2.3 million “secret commission”.
A class action against the NSW government over a contractor who took private details of 130 ambulance workers to on-sell to personal injury law firms, including Bannister Law, has settled.
A subpoena issued by the daughter of mining magnate Gina Rinehart seeking documents from Corrs Chambers Westgarth, the law firm representing her mother’s company, has been set aside by a judge, who found the material had no forensic purpose in the family’s long-running fight over a $5 billion trust.
A challenge by Quinn Emanuel to a NSW Supreme Court decision staying its shareholder class action against AMP has been unanimously dismissed by the Court of Appeal, which found the class action beauty contest was not decided in error and that subsequently filed representative proceedings were not an abuse of process.
The barrister leading an appeal seeking to revive Quinn Emanuel’s fees for no service class action against AMP has criticised the approach taken in the landmark GetSwift ruling on competing class actions, saying it placed the court in the role of auctioneer and actually encouraged duplicative proceedings.