Channel Seven has lost a six-year defamation battle over a Today Tonight story that described a woman on single parenting payments as “the Centrelink cheat who got away”, after an appeals court found the publication was “manifestly unreasonable”.
Wyeth has lost a bid to claim legal professional privilege over certain documents sought by Merck Sharp & Dohme as the two rivals head towards a hearing for the reopening of the Prevnar 13 patent case.
Chemical giant BASF has dropped a lawsuit against Lubrizol Corporation challenging proposed amendments to a fuel additive patent.
An Australian actor best known for his role on true crime drama series Underbelly is being sued for sexual harassment after he allegedly grabbed an extra on the set of Bikie Wars and forced his tongue into her mouth without consent.
Against a backdrop of an industrial relations system which has diminished union and workers’ power, class actions are again re-emerging as an alternative tool to challenge employers’ unlawful conduct. And in the current class actions landscape, the ability to run closed class proceedings on behalf of union members, or otherwise offer alternative fee arrangements to non-members in open class proceedings, is essential to trade unions’ willingness to embrace the representative proceeding regime, writes Slater & Gordon lawyer Alex Blennerhassett.
IOOF says it expects to challenge a $80.6 million judgment against subsidiary Australian Executor Trustees over the sale of a timber plantation by the collapsed Gunns Group that left its law firm, Sparke Helmore, off the hook despite a finding that the firm’s advice “fell short”.
The judge overseeing the Ethicon pelvic mesh class action has flagged serious public policy concerns stemming from class identification problems, amid fears that “poorer” patients in the public health system would be less likely to be notified of their rights compared to those in the private system.
A former Ernst & Young principal jailed for at least nine years for his role in a $135 million tax fraud has lost a challenge to two NSW Supreme Court orders barring access to $150 million worth of assets.
The National Tertiary Education Union has asked a court for permission to intervene in support of sacked physics professor and climate skeptic Peter Ridd as he fights James Cook University’s appeal of a $1.2 million judgment against it.
Generic drug maker Juno Pharmaceuticals and US-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals have reached an in-principle settlement in their trans-Pacific dispute over two patents covering breakthrough anti-cancer medication Velcade.
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