A leading Melbourne labour law firm has confirmed paying its best known partner a $1 million bonus for procuring a settlement of the Dow Corning breast implants class action. Nothing wrong with that, by the way; I mention it only for prurient interest and to provide some context to the work the firm does pushing back the frontiers of injustice. A former partner’s suit making sensational allegations against the partnership was settled soon after details of those allegations were released by The Australian. But the former partner has now unconditionally withdrawn the allegations, apologised, and discontinued the proceedings. The firm has, however, confirmed that its head honcho received the $1 million bonus for procuring a $32 million settlement from Dow Corning, the company bankrupted by class actions around the world — many of the statements of claim containing the same typos, according to Walter Olson — involving what is now thought to be very questionable science indeed. (Something Andrew Bolt has cottoned onto — but note the egregious error in his article which claims that fees in no-win no-fee litigation in Australia may be “up to a quarter of any payout”. That is quite wrong. A success fee may be no more than 125% of the fees usually charged by the firm. What Bolt is describing is a US-style contingency fee which is stringently forbidden in Victoria.)
