Sam Matthews

After a seven-year legal battle, a court has upheld the validity of Neurim Pharmaceutical’s patent for insomnia drug Circadin and ruled two generic drug companies infringed the intellectual property.

The High Court is set to weigh in on a challenge to a precedent-setting decision that found breaches of statutory duty under a provision of the Design and Building Practitioners Act are not apportionable, in a case with significant ramifications for the NSW construction industry.

The entity in charge of a $511 million waste-to-energy plant south of Perth has filed a second lawsuit against Acciona, accusing the Spanish infrastructure giant of withholding $38.6 million in bank guarantees to use as leverage in unrelated disputes about the troubled project.

The plaintiffs in two competing class actions against Mercedes-Benz over alleged defeat devices designed to cheat regulatory emissions tests have agreed to temporarily stay the first-filed proceeding so that one filed over a year later can go ahead, a court has heard. 

A court has given the green light to BHP’s bid to extend a Queensland coal mine over the objections of an environmental lobby group, saying the court’s acceptance of climate change did not mean it would reject all applications for fossil fuel projects.

A group of surgeons who worked for The Cosmetic Institute are set to pay $25 million to settle a class action brought on behalf of 13,500 patients who claim they were injured by botched breast augmentation surgery.

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.

ASIC chair Joe Longo has called on lawyers to be bold in their embrace of emerging technologies, saying lawyers “must be careful with generative AI but not afraid of it”. 

A tribunal has found prominent barrister Charles Waterstreet guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct for sexually harassing three women, but declined to find he was unfit to practice after accepting expert evidence that undiagnosed mental illness “was the dominant causal factor” behind his actions.

The majority shareholders of vitamin giant Nature’s Care have been hit with the costs of the company’s failed bid for an injunction against its founding family, after a judge found the shareholders appear to have caused proceedings to be commenced as part of a strategy to “override the rights” of the family.