Somerville Laundry Lomax Solicitors

A judge who tossed a house painter’s case over a one-star Google review has awarded partial indemnity costs to the critic and said her order should serve as a lesson about the “catastrophic” costs of defamation cases.

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.

In one of the first cases to test a new ‘serious harm’ threshold for defamation matters, a judge has knocked back a NSW house painter’s defamation case over a one star Google review, saying that people would consider “unflattering” business reviews to be expressions of personal opinion. 

An appeal judge has stayed a $170,000 judgment against the head of a New South Wales law firm after he was found to have engaged in a “particularly sinister” campaign of sexual harassment against a former employee, despite concerns that some of his appeal grounds were “barely arguable”.