Insurer Liberty Mutual is challenging its loss in a coverage dispute with construction company Icon Co over $31 million in losses stemming from Sydney’s Opal Tower, whose residents were evacuated after cracks appeared in the tower’s walls on Christmas Eve in 2018.
A former Norton Rose Fulbright partner has won a long-running case over his termination, with a judge ruling the law firm had intentionally misled the lawyer and must pay him $160,000 for its deception.
A judge has said she was “currently minded” to sign off on a scheme of arrangement that would see last-mile logistics software firm GetSwift relocate to Canada, but has sought further submissions on whether any Australian civil penalties sought against the company by ASIC would be enforceable in the Canadian courts.
A PwC director who was terminated after suffering a back injury at work has sued the accounting giant claiming that her notice of termination was invalid because it was delivered through DocuSign.
The Fair Work Ombudsman has secured its first penalties under ‘serious contraventions’ provisions of the Fair Work Act, seeing a recidivist former Han’s Café franchisee in Perth and general manager slapped with $230,000 in fines for the”cavalier” and “entirely unacceptable” underpayment of vulnerable, young migrant workers.
A former director of defunct financial services company Linchpin Capital, who is facing a class action as well as civil penalty proceedings by ASIC, can’t put the brakes on his challenge to a five-year disqualification order by the regulator.
The parties in a class action against the Federal Government over the controversial Robodebt scheme have reached an in principle settlement as the first day of a highly anticipated hearing was scheduled to kick off.
Class action filings in the Victoria Supreme Court have more than doubled in 2020, a trend that’s likely to hold as law firms take advantage of a new law allowing them to earn contingency fees for running successful class actions.
Murray Goulburn’s former managing director Gary Helou and chief financial officer Brad Hingle have been disqualified from heading up companies after they were found to have breached the Corporations Act for their role in the milk supplier’s repeated failure to disclose an expected material decrease in the milk supplier’s earnings guidance for 2016.
The class members in the Gladstone Fisheries class action and their funder LCM Operations have successfully upheld in the Court of Appeal a declaration confirming the enforceability of the funding agreements in the case. This is an important decision, which validates the third party funding of class actions and puts to bed any residual arguments regarding the continuing effect of the medieval torts of maintenance and champerty on class action funding arrangements, says Susanna Taylor, LCM’s head of investment, APAC.
For information on rights and reprints, contact subscriptions@lawyerly.com.au
