Maurice Blackburn

As the head of Maurice Blackburn’s class actions group he helped win hundreds of millions of dollars for claimants and shaped the jurisprudence around the practice. As the Victorian Supreme Court’s newest judge, Andrew Watson has promised to keep up the fight for fair.

The NSW Court of Appeal has said it has no power to exclude group members who do not sign up to a class action from participating in a settlement, upholding a controversial decision that the Full Federal Court said was “plainly wrong”. 

The former head of legal for the West Gate Tunnel project has sued toll road operator Transurban, alleging she was made redundant after complaining about “a culture of fear and intimidation” on the project.

A judge has refused to redact a judgment signing off on the discontinuance of several product claims in a class action against three AMP subsidiaries after the applicant failed to gather the required evidence, saying it was not enough that the reasons “may be an embarrassment to people who commenced the proceeding”. 

A five-year-old class action against BHP over the collapse of a Brazilian dam is seeking to amend the group definition following a judgment limiting the class size, but the mining company says it should not be punished for the applicant’s pleading mistake.

On the eve of trial, rideshare giant Uber has agreed to pay $271.8 million to settle a five-year-old class action brought by taxi and hire car drivers in four states over the introduction of UberX.

A judge has chided the Transport Workers Union for announcing at the start of trial that it intends to seek lost union dues from Qantas, as a hearing kicked off over the amount of compensation the airline owes to ground crew, whose jobs were illegally outsourced at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A class action representing thousands of junior doctors alleging they were systematically underpaid has settled with NSW Health for a confidential sum, but a related union case is set to continue.

Software company TechnologyOne will bring a strike-out application in a lawsuit by a former regional sales director alleging the company unfairly put him on a performance improvement plan and forced him to work excessive hours.

A judge has quashed the OAIC’s decision to reject a second class action-style complaint filed over the massive Optus data breach, finding the Privacy Act does not bar second-in-time proceedings.