Ashurst

The Albanese government will urge the court to shut down a Shine Lawyers-led class action against McDonald’s for allegedly denying workers rest breaks and allow a similar $250 million case by the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association to proceed instead.

S&P Global is fighting bids to expand a class action alleging systemic defects in its ratings systems to a new type of complex financial product and to include allegations from a US Department of Justice case in a separate suit by two Cayman Islands-based companies.

The divisive issue of whether judges are empowered to make a common fund order to distribute the costs of a funding commission at the settlement stage of a class action is headed back to the Full Federal Court next week.

A law firm running underpayments class actions against Coles and Woolworths has sought orders forcing them to hand over contact details for key workers in the Fair Work Ombudsman’s parallel cases, which the supermarket giants lashed as likely to “cause chaos” in the proceedings.

Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel and three other Palmer-related entities have been ordered to pay $44.5 million (US$30.8 million) to litigation funder Vannin Capital for defaulting on a loan for a private jet.

Ashurst has bolstered its Sydney tax practice with the addition of two senior taxation lawyers from Deloitte.

Uber has won a strike-out bid in a lawsuit by drivers challenging their classification as independent contractors, with a judge finding the pleading was “self-evidently, uncommonly and irretrievably deficient.”

Collapsed engineering firm Forge Group has defeated an appeal seeking to block its liquidators from bringing a case against engineering company Clough Limited for alleged insider trading during the 2013 sale of a $187 million stake in the company.

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.

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.”