A Federal Court judge has declined to recuse herself from hearing the parallel cases of a former aircraft engineer on the basis that she is a member of Qantas's Chairman's Lounge.
A judge has suppressed details of a criminal defence lawyer's adverse action case against the firm that recently represented alleged Bondi gunman Naveed Akram, noting that any efforts at mediation would be "imperilled" by the airing of "sensitive" allegations and medical reports.
A full Federal Court has found Metro Trains Melbourne discharged its reverse onus in an adverse action case despite its failure to call a workplace relations head and practising lawyer it approached for "IR advice" in the lead-up to a senior manager's sacking.
A judge has made a $350,000 costs order against the former vice chair of an energy company that offered her a $300,000 settlement before discovering, post-sacking, that she had transferred confidential information to her personal computer and a USB device.
In a significant decision on the Fair Work Act's geographical reach, FWC president Adam Hatcher has questioned whether workers need to be both employed by an Australian company and perform work in the country before enjoying the legislation's protections.
The FWC has refused permission for an aviation company and a former manager to be represented by lawyers and an unpaid layperson after they volleyed complaints about each other and offered-up "irrelevant material".
A worker's one-day-late general protections claim can proceed, after the FWC accepted that the AMWU's withdrawal from representing him just two days before the filing deadline left him "temporarily incapacitated".
A court has thrown out a worker's claim that his employer denied him a chance to defend allegations of intimidating a manager because "society today suggests that a female's word is true", finding instead that it sacked him because of performance issues.
In a case highlighting the judicial system's concerns about self-represented litigants using artificial intelligence, a judge has binned a neurophysiologist's "prolix" 191-page statement of claim and ordered her to "permanently delete" confidential information obtained from her former employer, partly out of fears it could find its way into the public domain if she is feeding it into AI.
