Maurice Blackburn has partly prevailed in an appeal of a judge’s decision to put the brakes on its shareholder class action against BHP while greenlighting a competing case brought by Phi Finney McDonald, with an appeals court ordering the rival law firms to negotiate a deal to consolidate their litigation.
Maurice Blackburn’s funding model rejected by a judge overseeing a beauty parade of class actions against BHP appeared structured to incentivise the firm to push up its legal fees, an appeals court said Monday on the first day of a high stakes hearing challenging a decision to shut down two of three competing cases against the mining giant.
Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers is resisting a notice to produce audit files in a consolidated shareholder class action over the collapse of education and training company Vocation, arguing its partners face a real risk of criminal and civil penalty proceedings and are entited to claim privilege against self-incrimination.
Law firm Maurice Blackburn has fired its opening salvo in a high-stakes appeal of a judge’s decision rejecting its class action against BHP over the Brazilian dam failure, saying the ruling deprived group members of pocketing higher net returns on any recovery and of choosing a more experienced firm to run the case for them.
Private training company Ashley Services and auditors Deloitte and Grant Thornton will pay a combined $14.6 million to settle a shareholder class action, and IMF Bentham says it may bank $7.2 million for funding the litigation.
Accounting firm Pitcher Partners, which is facing two shareholder class actions over auditing work for Slater & Gordon, is considering filing claims of its own against the law firm’s current auditor, Ernst & Young.
The battle over competing shareholder class actions against logistics tech company GetSwift is over, with the High Court rejecting a bid by one of the losing class action applicants to take another look at their case.
ANZ has reached an in-principle settlement in two class actions alleging it breached its responsible lending obligations by providing loans to purchasers of 7-Eleven franchises that were not financially viable.
A judge has rejected a bid by former directors of Slater & Gordon to throw out cross claims brought by Pitcher Partners in two shareholder class actions alleging the accounting firm wrongly signed off on the law firm’s financial reports ahead of a share price nosedive, saying it was possible Pitcher Partners’ claimed reliance on representations by the directors was reasonable.
Global pharmaceutical giant Lundbeck has launched a bid to escape a prior undertaking blocking it from appealing a court’s decision that allowed four generic drug makers to apply for licences to manufacture generic versions of popular antidepressant Lexapro.