At a time of increasing shareholder activism a recent decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court has confirmed that activist shareholders have a very limited part to play in the exercise of a boards power in the management of a company Partners Kim Reid and Julian Donnan and Associate Manu ...

The Parliamentary Economics Committee released its report following its review into Australias four major banks yesterday Our Financial Services Regulation team has a look at the recommendations in this update ...

New South Wales Court of Appeal case Arab Bank Australia v Sayde Developments considered the application of penalties doctrine to default interest rate provisions in load agreements post the high court's libera approach to the doctrine in Paciocco v ANZ. ...

A recent New South Wales Court of Appeal decision concerned a guarantee purportedly signed by e-signature without the guarantors knowledge It is an interesting case-study though the decision is really about ostensible authority and ratification Senior Finance Counsel Diccon Loxton considers its ...

Our class actions team recently published our Class Action Risk 2016 report The objective of the report is to look behind the headlines and hype that often surrounds class actions to provide a more holistic and objective assessment of class action risk for our clients This is particularly important ...

The new Life Insurance Code of Practice has much to recommend it The paragraphs concerning policy design are a case in point But is the Code indeed just a code or does it purport to go further ...

OAIC concludes investigation of Australian Red Cross data breach where a one-off human error by a third party provider's employee led to a massive data breach that hit the Australian Red Cross Blood Service ...

The Full Federal Court has unanimously held that patent term extensions are not available for second medical use claims involving the use of recombinant DNA technology This decision overturns a controversial finding of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal last year and means that any patent term ...

After a considerable gestation period the proposed new design and distribution obligations for financial products, and intervention powers for ASIC, took their first, tentative steps yesterday, with the release of exposure draft legislation. ...

A broadened definition of whistleblower reforms to establish greater protections for whistleblowers and increased sanctions for retaliatory conduct are some of the recommendations by a Senate committee looking into whistleblower protections in the corporate public and not-for-profit sector We expect ...