Healthcare

A bid to drop a class action against Philips Electronics over recalled sleep apnea machines showed a gap in access to justice that was “very hard to fill” given the high cost of bringing large scale litigation, a judge has said.

Boutique law firm Barry Nilsson has snagged a Norton Rose Fulbright disputes partner who specialises in healthcare product liability class actions and his five-member team to join its Sydney office. 

Australia’s largest private health insurer Medibank has been hit with a shareholder class action in the wake of a massive cyberattack that left the data of 10 million customers exposed.

A unit of Purdue Pharma has fired off a cross-claim in Australian drug maker AUPharma’s lawsuit alleging the US drug giant was wrongly granted patent extensions for oxycodone products marketed as Targin.

Beauty giant McPherson’s has denied ASIC’s claims that it misled the market and breached its disclosure obligations in 2020, arguing that a document showing sales of its Dr LeWinn’s line were down by $21 million was a draft that couldn’t have been used to revise a financial forecast.

German pharmaceutical giant Bayer has slammed generic drug make Sandoz’s late bid for documents, which it called an attempt to “divert and distract” Bayer on the eve of a three-week trial over the patents for its top-selling blood clot drug Xarelto.

A judge has approved a $300 million settlement in two pelvic mesh class actions against Johnson & Johnson and unit Ethicon — the largest settlement in the history of Australian product liability group proceedings — but a $100 million deduction for legal costs has yet to get the greenlight. 

Boston Scientific’s $105 million settlement of a class action over its pelvic mesh devices has secured court approval, but the costs billed by the law firm running the case will face further scrutiny.

The reputation of a registered trade mark and its owner is not relevant in assessing the deceptive similarity of a challenged mark, the High Court has found, clarifying the test for infringement under a section of the Trade Marks Act.

A class action against Bayer over its Essure contraceptive has lost a bid to knock out the pharmaceutical giant’s defence that argues any defects in the device could not have been discovered given the state of scientific knowledge at the time the implants were sold in Australia.