From the ongoing saga of the high-profile Christian Porter action against the ABC to “backyard” litigation testing the serious harm bar, defamation cases made headlines in 2022, with winners and losers alike shelling out millions to lawyers to protect their reputations.
A judge has found Nine should not face an out-of-time defamation action over an allegedly defamatory episode of A Current Affair that aired in 2019.
Courts stepped up their scrutiny of class action settlements in 2022, with judges grappling with difficult issues such as funding commissions in employment cases and whether settlements, even those worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were fair to group members.
Requests by litigants for judges to disqualify themselves from presiding over cases were largely denied last year, in a raft of decisions containing lessons for litigants weighing up their own recusal bids in 2023.
A judge has vacated an upcoming trial in shareholder class actions against former Quintis director Frank Wilson and Ernst & Young, after learning judgment in similar ASIC proceedings against Wilson will not be delivered before the class action hearing kicks off.
The man behind the Twitter handle Stock Swami has been ordered to pay $275,000 in damages to Tolga Kumova, after a judge found his tweets defamed the mining investor by accusing him of insider trading, misleading the market, and running a pump and dump scheme.
Lawyers for respondents in defamation litigation have been put on notice for their practice of tossing defences around like grenades in armed combat — it isn’t going to fly any more, warns a judge whose docket is stacked with high profile cases.
The state of Western Australia has been left with a $2 million legal bill for defending a defamation action by billionaire Clive Palmer and advancing cross-claims on behalf of premier Mark McGowan, which a judge blasted as “a futile exercise”.
A judge has rejected Shine Lawyers’ second bid to challenge a court order that it join forces with rival Banton Group in an investor class action Blue Sky Alternative Investments and auditor EY, saying the firm’s funder LCM was trying to “take the bat and ball and go home.” Federal Court Justice Michael Lee rejected…
A $1.5 million class action settlement against failed logistics provider GetSwift, which a judge termed a “disaster”, has been revised down to $1 million and may face a liquidators’ challenge that could see a group members recover nothing.