Western Australia

Senator Linda Reynolds has admitted that she leaked a confidential letter from the Commonwealth’s solicitors to a reporter at The Australian concerning Brittany Higgins’ claims about the handling of her rape allegations, calling the letter’s confidentiality a “legal nicety” that she didn’t understand.

A unit of construction company Fletcher Building has been hit with a class action over its Pro-Fit pipes, which have been blamed by Western Australian builder BGC for plumbing failures in thousands of Perth homes.

Senator Linda Reynolds has taken the stand in her defamation case against Brittany Higgins, telling a court on Tuesday she encouraged the former staffer to go to the police after her alleged rape by colleague Bruce Lehrmann because she was “not the right person” to conduct an investigation.  

Brittany Higgins’ counsel has argued that her former boss, Senator Linda Reynolds, mishandled her staffer’s allegation she was raped by colleague Bruce Lehrmann at Parliament House, saying she effectively told her to “go elsewhere”.

As another trial traversing the rape allegations of former political staffer Brittany Higgins gets underway, a lawyer for Senator Linda Reynolds has told a court Higgins’ claim she was pressured not to pursue a complaint against Bruce Lehrmann was the stuff of fairytales.

The Legal Practice Board’s decision to audit lawyers at a compensation firm following a complaint about paralegals allegedly engaging in unqualified legal practice has been quashed, with a court finding the law didn’t permit investigation of individual solicitors.

Dutch paint company AkzoNobel has lost a mid-trial bid to inspect instructions given by Allen & Overy to experts who tested its allegedly unsuitable protective coating used on pipework on the $45 billion Ichthys natural gas project. 

An appeals court has knocked back builder Hanssen’s attempt to dodge a decade-old dispute over repairs to one of its residential buildings on constitutional grounds, saying the Perth company’s argument would precipitate an “extraordinary” result if accepted.

A judge has rejected an application by a director of mining tech company Globaltech to replace administrators from McGrathNicol after arguing there was an appearance of bias since their fellow partners used to be on the board of its biggest unsecured creditor, Boart Longyear.

The director of a Perth law firm fired a legal assistant by a text message that was generated with ChatGPT, the Fair Work Commission has found.