An elite Melbourne law firm has become the latest target of Slater & Gordon shareholders whose stock went south after the plaintiffs firm’s disastrous $1.2 billion acquisition of UK professional services outfit Quindell, facing a class action alleging it was negligent in its role conducting due diligence for the deal.
The High Court has done away with a rule that allowed self-represented lawyers to claim costs for legal proceedings, calling the exception an “affront to the fundamental value of equality of all persons before the law”.
Norton Rose Fulbright will have to wait another six months before a long-running dispute with a former partner will be heard, after the ex-employee successfully argued it would be “ludicrous” for the trial to proceed.
The third judge assigned to oversee a lawsuit filed against law firm Norton Rose Fulbright by a former partner has refused to recuse himself on the grounds of apprehended bias, despite being accused of behaviour that was “grossly disrespectful”, “absurdly obtuse” and “fundamentally lacking in logic”.
In a year in which it settled a shareholder class action against itself and purchased a class action boutique, publicly-traded law firm Shine Lawyers has posted a profit of $14 million, down more than 26 percent from last year’s $19 million.
Two patent attorneys who are being sued by a boutique IP firm for jumping ship to start their own business have cleared the first hurdle in their fight against preliminary discovery, after a judge found the documents relied upon by their former employer’s lawyers at Seyfarth Shaw were relevant to the case.
The federal Attorney-General has unveiled a new system for the allocation of more than $1 billion in external legal services to the Commonwealth government over the next five years, with just two Australian law firms approved in every practice area.
Coal producer Glencore International has lost its High Court appeal to keep the Australian Taxation Office from reviewing documents related to its offshore assets, which were unearthed as part of the global Paradise Papers investigation.
Lawyerly’s inaugural class action report shows one plaintiffs firm dominating the field, running more than twice the active class actions as its nearest rivals. But a group of capable and ambitious firms are nipping at its heels.
Many commercial dispute resolution groups in Australia are getting a boost from class action defence work, as more parties get dragged into increasingly complex representative proceedings. But the Big Six firms are still the ones companies turn to the most when staring down a class action.