The Supreme Court of Western Australia has stayed counterclaims by Bianca Rinehart and John Hancock and sent a long-running Rinehart family dispute over control of valuable mining assets such as the Hope Downs iron ore mine into arbitration.
From a record-setting funder’s cut to the first call for ‘“proportionality”, last year saw a number of groundbreaking judgments approving class action settlements worth more than half a billion dollars. Here are the 10 biggest settlements of 2018, and the law firms and funders that negotiated them.
Two law firms have launched formal investigations into possible class actions over Sydney’s defective Opal Tower, inviting owners of units in the “crumbling” building to register their interest in joining legal proceedings.
Generic drug maker Sandoz is challenging a ruling that it infringed a patent behind Lundbeck’s blockbuster antidepressant Lexapro, reviving a 15-year fight over the lucrative intellectual property.
A challenge to the legality of common fund orders, an appeal to the High Court over the power of judges to stay competing cases, one of the first judgments in a shareholder class action and reform proposals promise to make 2019 another action-packed year in class actions. Here, experts give their predictions for the class action landscape this year.
The applicant in a class action against Ford over allegedly defective PowerShift transmissions has taken another stab at bringing an unconscionable conduct claim, after the judge overseeing the case panned an earlier pleading as “problematic”.
Last year was an exciting one for class action lawyers, with monumental court decisions on competing cases, cross-jurisdictional spats, proportionality in settlements and the power of judges to decide how a recovery is distributed. Here, top class action litigators tell us what the most significant rulings of 2018 were and why the decisions will continue to matter this year.
Debt collector ACM Group has been hit with a $750,000 fine for engaging in unconscionable conduct by misleading, harassing and coercing two vulnerable customers while chasing unpaid debts.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission wants to block former We Buy Houses director Rick Otton from using the proceeds from the sale of his $3.6 million Bondi home to help with legal costs and living expenses as he appeals a record $6 million fine for consumer law violations.
The law firms that challenged a ruling staying their cases against GetSwift gave the Full Federal Court a chance to guide judges managing competing class actions, but they can’t avoid paying their opponents’ legal costs because the court happened to seize the opportunity.