Labour hire company WorkPac has been hit with a class action on behalf of hundreds of casual miners who claim they were denied annual leave and other entitlements.
Lawyerly spoke to ten class action experts on the release of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s highly anticipated report into the class action regime. While many of the ALRC’s proposals were expected — and welcomed as sensible — others were greeted with concern and skepticism. Here, we look at the most controversial of the 24 recommendations.
Law firms would be able to charge contingency fees and the corporate disclosure obligations would go under the microscope as part of a shake-up of the class action regime recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission.
Responding to a judge’s criticism of the class action “beauty parade”, two rival law firms have come up with a plan to deal with their competing shareholder class actions against Brambles.
National Australia Bank has rejected a class action’s claims that it pushed worthless credit card insurance onto its customers, saying it was up to the customers to determine the true value of the coverage.
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.
A judge who signed off on a contested $36.5 million settlement to resolve a $1 billion class action against Slater & Gordon has explained his reasons a year later, saying the “unusual” deal flowed from the law firm’s “dire financial situation”.
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.
Adero Law has filed class actions against labour hire companies Hays and Stellar Personnel on behalf of casual miners who allege they were entitled to accrued leave, on the eve of what’s expected to be a banner year for employment class actions in Australia.
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.