Justice Melissa Perry

P&O Cruises has resolved a group of personal injury cases by passengers who were seriously hurt in a bus collision in Vanuatu in 2016.

Former Liberal MP Andrew Laming has been hit with a $40,000 fine for failing to disclose that he was behind three politically motivated Facebook posts in 2018 and 2019.

An incorporated legal practice has lost its bid to recover costs for work done by its own solicitors while self-represented in a dispute with a former client, with the Full Federal Court finding that making an exception based on firm size would “revive an inequality before the law”.

Start-up Element Zero claims Fortescue did not disclose material information to the court when it obtained search orders in its case alleging “industrial scale misuse” of the mining company’s confidential information.

A judge has thrown out a self-represented customer’s lawsuit against non-bank lender Latitude Financial after he defaulted on court orders and refused to join tech giants DXC Technology and Crowdstrike to his case over a cyberattack that compromised 14 million customer records. 

Ramsay Health Care has won a partial interim injunction banning the union representing its nurses from running ads that claim the private hospital operator runs on a staff-to-patient ratio double that of public hospitals.

The judge overseeing a suite of cases brought by holidaymakers who were seriously injured in a fatal bus collision in Vanuatu has hit out at QBE for ignoring queries about an insurance policy, as the defendants in the case scramble pass the buck for the crash. 

Judges were not afraid to vent their spleen in 2023, but lawyers were not the only object of judicial scorn last year, as judges waded into public discourse and sounded off over issues including complex legislation, media reports, famous social media commentators, and the involvement of government departments in legal proceedings. 

An environmental group has lost its case alleging the federal government failed to take climate change into account when it renewed an agreement for logging in New South Wales, with a judge saying it was a ‘political’ issue rather than one for the courts.

Victims of privacy breaches must demonstrate actual loss and damage to be eligible for compensation, according to a judge who has given asylum seekers who secured a ruling from the Privacy Commissioner a second chance at proving loss from the public disclosure of their personal information.