Costs have traditionally followed the event. Put up 5 reasons why you should get damages and win on 1 of them, and the starting point has been that you get the costs of the whole proceeding, including of the 4 causes of action which failed. Recent decisions of a Full Federal Court constituted [...]

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The New South Wales Court of Appeal overturned a trial judge's order that the plaintiff's solicitor personally pay costs of joining a particular party against whom leave to discontinue was successfully sought in the first days of the trial. The order was made under s. 348 of the NSW Legal Profession Act, 2004, in [...]

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The latest application for an order that a party's solicitor pay the costs of proceedings personally is Whyked Pty Ltd v Yahoo!7 Pty Ltd [2008] NSWSC 477. In dismissing the application, Justice McDougall commented:

'[185] In theory, the courts are open to all. In practice, access to the courts is often dictated by the availability [...]

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The NSW Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal from a decision finding that a solicitor was not immune from a negligence suit based on a failure to prepare evidence promptly, though its comments in relation to immunity were obiter dicta [102]. Although the evidence did get adduced after a change of solicitors and before the [...]

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I was already a fan of the first edition of Judge Stephen Walmsley SC, Alister Abadee, and Ben Zipser's excellent Professional Liability in Australia, published by Thomson, and had been waiting for the new edition with interest. I got myself a copy the other day. It's good, and there are substantial additions since [...]

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In Macteldir Pty Limited v Roskov [2007] FCAFC 49, the subject of the last post but one, the Full Federal Court explained the ambit of Order 62 rule 9 of the Federal Court Rules (which is reproduced in the previous post):
'The Relevant Principles
[56] The parties generally accepted as correct the statements of principle found in [...]

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In Macteldir Pty Limited v Roskov [2007] FCAFC 49, my old firm Middletons convinced a unanimous Full Federal Court to pronounce sternly that advocates' immunity may not be circumvented by a client seeking to invoke the wasted costs jurisdiction of the Court against its own former lawyers, and to re-emphasise emphatically that the wasted [...]

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