Westpac has agreed to pay $29.95 million to settle a class action alleging subsidiaries BT Funds Management Limited and Westpac Life Insurance Services Limited charged customers excessive superannuation fees between 2007 and 2019.
Queensland government-owned water services provider Sunwater has lost a bid to overturn a judgment letting insurer Liberty Mutual Insurance off the hook for its share of a $440 million settlement in the Queensland floods class action.
Competition among class action law firms is expected to heat up next year as veteran lawyer Jan Saddler departs Shine Lawyers to start her own firm.
A law firm has dropped plans to bring a second set of class actions alleging Apple and Google engaged in anti-competitive conduct in operating their app stores, but will act as an “agent” for the first-to-file firm.
A recent ruling cutting the contingency fee sought by a plaintiff law firm shows competition to run class actions will drive down the percentage payout courts are willing to permit. And as more firms enter the market for a slice of the returns, the downward pressure on profits will only build.
A judge has described as “extraordinary” a law firm’s argument that the court should approve a $5.8 million settlement in an underpayments class action against the On The Run convenience store chain partly because it ran out of funds to take the case to trial.
Two Dixon Advisory insurers have lost a bid to limit the details of insurance policies handed over to a class action purported to worth $463 million, after a judge’s ruled the collapsed wealth manager should disclose its insurance for liability in the case.
A judge has found the applicant in a dismissed class action against animal health giant Zoetis is liable for the company’s defence costs in the case centering on alleged serious side effects of horse vaccine Equivac.
A judge has signed off on a group costs order in class action against Allianz over add-on car insurance that will give plaintiff law firms Johnson Winter & Slattery and Maurice Blackburn no more than 25 per cent of any resolution in the case.
Companies associated with the wife of disgraced senior barrister Norman O’Bryan can’t get a new judge to hear their battle against a third-party costs summons that would make them jointly liable for a $21.5 million judgment for investors in a class action over Banksia Securities’ collapse.