Wealth management firm Colonial First State has lost its bid to shield emails with internal counsel about investment options for its FirstChoice super fund after a judge found a class action applicant had joint legal professional privilege.
A fed-up judge has vented his frustration with the problem of competing class actions in a move that appears to punish the second filed case against Medibank. But is he right that the courts are increasingly being asked to deal with duplicative proceedings? And was his order really all that drastic?
A judge aggrieved by the “plague” of competing class actions in the courts has temporarily stayed a second data breach class action against Medibank, and directed the health insurer to ask the privacy commissioner to drop the investigation of a third case.
A judge has questioned an “unusual” bid by Noumi to shield over 3,000 documents, their titles and the identities of those who sent them to PricewaterhouseCoopers during a 2020 investigation into the food company’s financial position.
A judge has criticised a bid by the NSW government to access seven months of messages relating to drugs by the lead plaintiff in a class action over allegedly illegal strip searches at a Byron Bay music festival, saying they seemed “wholly irrelevant” to the case.
Private health insurer Medibank has been served with a second class action over a data breach exposing the personal details of 10 million customers.
The applicants in a shareholder class action against the former Freedom Foods have failed in a bid to cross-examine Noumi’s inhouse counsel on affidavits swearing to the legal professional privilege of 3,000 documents, including material containing advice from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Optus has been hit with a class action on behalf of current and former customers whose personal information was exposed in a massive data breach last September that affected up to 10 million people.
Bayer told a jury that clinical trials from the 1990’s to 2014 showed its Essure birth control device was “safe and efficacious”, as the pharmaceutical giant faces trial in a class action by patients who claim they suffered debilitating injuries from the device.
Pharmaceutical giant Bayer cannot write off debilitating chronic pain and bleeding which patients allegedly experienced after being implanted with Essure contraceptives as “common women’s symptoms”, a court has heard in the first day of trial in a long-running class action.