Barrister Norman O’Bryan SC has failed in his last-ditch bid to reopen his defence in the Banksia class action to submit evidence he says shows he did not retain an interest in the litigation funder behind the case.
The judge overseeing the trial alleging fraud on the part of barristers and the funder behind a class action over Banksia Securities will be asked to award at least $32 million to the failed property lender’s 16,000 debenture holders for the serious misconduct alleged against the lawyers.
The law firm behind a long-running class action over the 2011 floods in Queensland which reached a $440 million partial settlement last month has estimated that its legal bill to date totals around $60 million.
Ardent Leisure Group has hit back at a $310 million shareholder class action, denying that there were “obvious” risks in its Thunder River Rapids Ride ahead of a 2016 tragedy at the Dreamworld theme park which claimed four lives.
A judge has allowed Woolworths to include details of its internal pay review processes in an opt out notice to be sent to disgruntled current and former employees who have launched a class action against the supermarket giant.
A group of late opt out notices by group members in a class action over IAG insurance, who were egged on in part by a ‘corporate warfare’ campaign by claims management service Claimo, could result in IAG pulling the plug on a $138 million settlement.
A judge overseeing a class action against Bayer-owned Monsanto over its allegedly carcinogenic weedkiller, Roundup, has declined to rule on the admissibility of expert evidence in a hearing ahead of trial next year, despite concerns about the independence of the expert witnesses for the class.
A $150 million class action has been launched against South Australian power company SA Power Networks over the December 2019 Cudlee Creek bushfire, which destroyed over 96 homes in the state and led to one death.
Lawyers and experts welcomed the High Court’s ruling Wednesday, which approved a class action beauty parade approach to dealing with competing proceedings and provided guidance as to how judges might otherwise manage the problem of duplicative cases. Here, Lawyerly outlines the important things to take away from the majority’s judgment.
Judges have power to manage competing class actions by picking a winner in a so-called beauty parade, the High Court has ruled, but there is no one size fits all approach to the decision, and the law firm that files first is not guaranteed the coveted prize.