The reopening of law firm offices in Melbourne and Sydney may still be months away but firms have given Lawyerly a glimpse of what it might look like when staff do return to the office, from split workforces to strictly enforced health and safety rules. One thing is for sure, COVID-19 has changed the way lawyers will work from now on.
The widow of mining billionaire Ken Talbot has filed a negligence lawsuit against law firms Arnold Bloch Leibler and Boyd Legal for their handling of her late husband’s estate, which she claims resulted in tens of millions of dollars in losses.
Maurice Blackburn has come up short in its challenge to a multimillion dollar tax bill for a record settlement payout in the Black Saturday bushfire class actions.
A former solicitor with McCabe Curwood has lost his attempt to overturn an order that he pay $36,000 in costs to his former employer, after an appeals court found that his challenge was “incompetent”.
With COVID-19 forcing courts to deal with more matters on the papers, written submissions are more important than ever and must be carefully crafted to assist the court while offering clients the best chance of success, barristers told Lawyerly.
The High Court’s abolition of the so-called Chorley exception, which allowed self-represented lawyers to recover their own expenses, also extends to incorporated legal practices through which a sole practitioner operates, a court has found.
The NSW Supreme Court has announced a staged reopening of in-person hearings after a two-month hiatus as well as measures to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission, including temperature checks and increased cleaning and disinfection of high-traffic areas.
A Melbourne-based immigration law firm has been dragged into court by job search platform Seek for alleged flagrant violations of its trade marks.
Lawyers can kiss goodbye to the daily commute because working from home, which has become the new normal during the coronavirus pandemic, is here to stay, according to several leading law firms.
Atanaskovic Hartnell has mostly come up short in a court battle for over $172,000 in legal fees, with a judge finding the law firm was in a “manifest position of conflict” in its dispute with two media companies defrauded by one of its former lawyers, Brody Clarke.