Gilbert + Tobin

Start-up Element Zero has attacked search orders won by Fortescue over the alleged misappropriation of the mining company’s confidential information by three former employees, calling the orders an “industrial scale forensic debacle” won on weak evidence and the failure to disclose material information.

Former Melbourne Demons chairman Glen Bartlett has been given the green light to relaunch a defamation case against the AFL club’s president and other senior officials after discontinuing proceedings that were transferred from his home state of Western Australia to Victoria.

A judge has ruled that Acciona must deliver $38.6 million in bank guarantees to the entity in charge of a $511 million waste-to-energy plant in Western Australia, despite allegations of insolvency levelled by the Spanish infrastructure giant.

Deciding an “unusually difficult” costs application, a judge has declined to award Monsanto all of its costs for defending a class action alleging its Roundup weed killer is carcinogenic, saying the agrochemical giant should have pushed harder for a split trial. 

A judge appears reluctant to allow Element Zero to cross-examine an external lawyer hired by mining company Fortescue over alleged “egregious material non-disclosure” during Fortescue’s bid for “extreme and unorthodox” search orders against the green startup’s founders.

Gaming giant Aristocrat has defeated a challenge by Light & Wonder to discovery orders it won for a possible lawsuit alleging two former employees who jumped ship to its rival misused confidential information about its popular Lightning Link and Dragon Link games.

It would only have been possible for start-up Element Zero to deliver an operational green iron prototype in two years with its assumed funding with the help of a “substantial amount of information” on how the project should progress, metals giant Fortescue claims.

Relative newcomer Hamilton Locke has lured two lawyers from Corrs Chambers Westgarth and one from Gilbert + Tobin to grow its corporate team.

The High Court has been asked to overturn a Full Court decision finding lawyers can take a cut from a class action settlement under a solicitors’ common fund order and to finally settle the question of whether the court has the power to issue common fund orders at all.

Mining company Fortescue, which alleges green iron startup Element Zero misused confidential information, is fighting a bid to cross-examine its external lawyer as part of an application to quash search orders.