Judges

Japanese bank SMBC has foreshadowed an application to add claims against Humm Group after the fintech’s subsidiary allegedly misled the bank about receivables under contracts forged by a Forum Group entity.

The publisher of the Herald Sun has won a bid to include the drug-related arrest of a prominent Melbourne lawyer in its “bad reputation” defence to the solicitor’s defamation action.

The ACCC’s rejection of a regional network arrangement between Telstra and TPG was “confusing” and the telecos might be free to vary the transaction, says a judge who is overseeing a challenge to the competition regulator’s decision.

Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch has cited the “editorial interference” of Private Media chairman Eric Beecher and CEO Will Hayward in a successful bid to join them as defendants in his defamation case against the Crikey publisher over an article in June last year.

Two former directors of the Australian unit of BCEG have lost their “urgent” bid to vary freezing orders after a judge found they swindled millions from the company to fund their own developments and buy a luxury apartment.

A judge has approved a $5.8 million settlement in an underpayments class action against convenience store chain On The Run despite what she said was the class action law firm’s “extraordinary” reason for reaching the deal.

From the ongoing saga of the high-profile Christian Porter action against the ABC to “backyard” litigation testing the serious harm bar, defamation cases made headlines in 2022, with winners and losers alike shelling out millions to lawyers to protect their reputations.

A judge has found Nine should not face an out-of-time defamation action over an allegedly defamatory episode of A Current Affair that aired in 2019.

Courts stepped up their scrutiny of class action settlements in 2022, with judges grappling with difficult issues such as funding commissions in employment cases and whether settlements, even those worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were fair to group members.

Two former staffers of senator Jacqui Lambie who represented themselves in an unsuccessful unfair dismissal case have been hit with nearly $50,000 in legal costs each due to their “unreasonable conduct” in the case, including attempts to turn the proceeding into “a trial by media.”