Barristers

A judge has found a BHP mine took adverse action against a labour hire worker by excluding him from entering a Queensland mine after he complained about safety, rejecting arguments that the mine could not take adverse action because it did not employ the worker directly.

Two former directors of the Australian unit of BCEG have lost their “urgent” bid to vary freezing orders after a judge found they swindled millions from the company to fund their own developments and buy a luxury apartment.

A judge has approved a $5.8 million settlement in an underpayments class action against convenience store chain On The Run despite what she said was the class action law firm’s “extraordinary” reason for reaching the deal.

From the ongoing saga of the high-profile Christian Porter action against the ABC to “backyard” litigation testing the serious harm bar, defamation cases made headlines in 2022, with winners and losers alike shelling out millions to lawyers to protect their reputations.

A judge has found Nine should not face an out-of-time defamation action over an allegedly defamatory episode of A Current Affair that aired in 2019.

A judge has found Downer Energy was responsible for a costly shutdown at a NSW power plant caused by a “practically unthinkable” defect.

Courts stepped up their scrutiny of class action settlements in 2022, with judges grappling with difficult issues such as funding commissions in employment cases and whether settlements, even those worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were fair to group members.

Two former staffers of senator Jacqui Lambie who represented themselves in an unsuccessful unfair dismissal case have been hit with nearly $50,000 in legal costs each due to their “unreasonable conduct” in the case, including attempts to turn the proceeding into “a trial by media.”

In one of the first cases to test a new ‘serious harm’ threshold for defamation matters, a judge has knocked back a NSW house painter’s defamation case over a one star Google review, saying that people would consider “unflattering” business reviews to be expressions of personal opinion. 

Optus has won more time to bring a counterclaim in a $100 million lawsuit by mobile retailer TeleChoice alleging it was misled when the telecommunications giant claimed it would earn the same revenue as in an agreement that was being negotiated with Telstra.