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.
The competition regulator has asked the High Court to correct the Full Court’s alleged error in overturning a finding that builder J Hutchinson and the union for construction workers violated competition laws by agreeing to boycott an independent subcontractor at a Brisbane building site.
A Sydney concert promoter seeking a cut of the profits earned by Nine unit TEG Live for promoting a 2013 Australian tour with English-Irish boy band One Direction has taken his fight to the High Court.
The state of Victoria has won its bid to prevent lawyers for a class action over Victoria’s COVID-19 hotel quarantine debacle from proofing lay witnesses, ahead of a criminal trial against the Department of Health, which is due to start in May.
Hells Angels has asked the High Court to reinstate an award of $78,000 for online marketplace Redbubble’s infringement of its trade marks, after the Full Court found it was owed just $100 in nominal damages.
A judge has chided the Transport Workers Union for announcing at the start of trial that it intends to seek lost union dues from Qantas, as a hearing kicked off over the amount of compensation the airline owes to ground crew, whose jobs were illegally outsourced at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former AFL player and sports presenter Warren Tredea has failed in his $1.5 million breach of contract case against Channel 9, which terminated an agreement with him for refusing to have a COVID-19 vaccine.
The High Court has handed a win to a class action on behalf of Queensland ratepayers who were wrongly charged levies over a period of six years, rejecting the local council’s argument that the levies were put to good use.
IBAC has been vindicated by the High Court in a ruling that found Victoria’s anti-corruption agency had largely complied with its obligations to provide a public body and a senior officer with a reasonable opportunity to respond to adverse material in an investigation over unauthorised email access.