Two employment silks and a criminal barrister have been selected by the NSW government to serve on the state’s restored Industrial Court.
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.
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.
Senior counsel for the banking royal commission Rowena Orr KC has been appointed as a judge on Victoria’s Court of Appeal, with class action silk Alistair Pound appointed to fill her shoes as the state’s solicitor-general.
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.
A judge’s refusal to recuse himself from hearing a costs dispute between MinterEllison and a former client has been overturned, with a court finding that a number of complaints made about the judge by the client created “a contest” between them.
How to tell if a judge is buried under a mountain of outstanding judgments? Their mood will say it all. A sure-fire way to prolong that hearing with a vexatious litigant? Engage them in dialogue. Here, Lawyerly shares a High Court judge’s war stories and tips for new members of the bench. But what weight to give them? That’s a matter for you, he says.
A litigant in an estate dispute dropped his lawyers and filed a notice to the court naming Dentons Australia as his new firm of solicitors. Unhappily for him he made two mistakes: filing the notice himself, and apparently failing to tell anyone at Dentons he had hired them.
Victoria’s judicial watchdog has dropped its investigation of a complaint against Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Kerri Judd SC, who accused the judge of making comments attacking her professional integrity.
A judge’s decision to place little weight on the character reference of a defendant that read like the work of ChatGPT should make lawyers think twice before employing artificial intelligence to author material intended for the court’s eyes.