Despite a global economic slowdown Australian lawyers won’t face layoffs like their US counterparts, legal insiders say, but some who cashed in during the COVID-19 talent drought shouldn’t expect to see raises any time soon.
The new federal corruption watchdog that commenced operating Friday will likely turn its sights first on the award of public grants, and is expected to face a “huge backlog” of referrals.
The growing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT could shake up the landscape of intellectual property laws in Australia, and novel questions posed by the technology are likely to be answered in the courts before regulators step in, lawyers say.
With truth on its side, Nine’s defeat of soldier Ben Roberts-Smith’s lawsuit was a huge win for investigative journalism in Australia, but while it might make lawyers blink before bringing defamation cases, the victory is not a game-changer, experts say.
As the spotlight on class action costs grows, litigation funders can expect increased judicial scrutiny of their attempts to pass on the cost of after-the-event insurance premiums to class action members.
The tax leaks scandal engulfing PwC has shone a spotlight on the culture of large professional services firms, where ensuring compliance with good governance is akin to “herding cats”, experts say.
A fed-up judge has vented his frustration with the problem of competing class actions in a move that appears to punish the second filed case against Medibank. But is he right that the courts are increasingly being asked to deal with duplicative proceedings? And was his order really all that drastic?
A recent decision by the Federal Court that questioned whether the introduction of a serious harm test in defamation law could infringe the Judiciary Act has shone a light on the need for a federal defamation framework, legal experts say.
With legal practices shaping up as a ripe target for cyberattacks, experts say many firms have a long way to go in implementing best practice cybersecurity to avoid potentially “catastrophic” outcomes.
An infringement ruling against US singer Katy Perry in a case brought by an Australian fashion designer is a “win for the little guy”, experts say, showing that fame doesn’t give celebrities a blank cheque to exploit their brand at the expense of someone’s else’s registered trade mark.